The Drumfire imprint have already put their weight behind excellent UK-based country/ roots practitioners such as My Darling Clementine and Dean Owens, but in stocky Oxfordshire singer/ songwriter AGS CONNOLLY they have a real find on their hands.
Connolly has been plying the margins for a while, accruing positive notices from the likes of The Guardian and Country Music People along the way, but things really started moving after he ran into Dean Owens while playing the fringe stage at London’s Country 2 Country event in 2013.
Suitably impressed, Owens offered his production skills and also rounded up the services of a crack team of musicians including guitarist/ pedal steel maestro Stuart Nesbit and drummer Jim McDermott. The team decamped to Edinburgh’s legendary Castlesound Studios (The Blue Nile, Josef K etc) during the summer of 2013 and after just one disciplined week of recording emerged with ‘How About Now’: a debut LP which surely ranks among the very best in home-grown UK roots’ n’ country.
Crucially, that must read “roots’ n’ country” rather than “roots-rock,” too, for while the ‘The Dim And Distant’ rattles along like the faster bits of Elvis Costello’s ‘King Of America’ and ‘Trusty Companion’ makes a credible stab at anthemic four-square rock’ n’ roll, ‘How About Now’ largely has little truck with the punkier end of the genre a la Uncle Tupelo or Jason & The Scorchers.
Instead, Connolly quickly sets out his stall on the fierily defiant opener ‘When Country Was Proud’, where he notes - with just a tinge of vitriol - that the outlaw country that moves him is “not on the TV, barely on the radio...chances are none of your friends ever listen to Hank Snow.” It’s seeping with pride; name checks outlaw country pioneers such as Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and is set to an authentic backdrop conjured straight from Nashville’s grittiest honky-tonks.
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Connolly again readily shares his enthusiasm for the best of the outlaw tradition on ‘I Saw James Hand’: a passionate ode to fandom (“I saw James Hand at Pearl’s Dance Hall/ I was there in Fort Worth, James Hand T-shirt and all”) and apparently something of a personal Road to Damascus moment that all true music fans experience when following their heroes’ every move.
Great though these songs are, however, it’s when Connolly delves deep into the darkness of his soul and dredges up resonant, experience-fuelled songs of loss and loneliness that he really scores. The listener would probably expect credible, bottom-of-a-glass-darkly observations such as I’m Not Someone You Want To Know from a country-based LP of this nature, but Connolly also has the ability to fashion restrained, genre-straddling beauties such as Get Out Of My Mind and the gorgeous, stripped-down titular song and it’s when he delivers them straight and true with that plaintive, lived-in voice that he truly leads the field in the all-too-congested Americana stakes.
Ags Connolly online
Drumfire Records online
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