148: Tobacco City - Autumn

Well, it's all here. Piano and pedal steel, broken hearts and hammered dulcimers, organs and oh oh oh, those melodies. So rich and full and conjured out of long magic nights. Out of the ether. Tobacco City.

There are nods to Gram Parsons and Emmylou, a six-minute bar room shuffle called 'Mr Wine', an introduction that tells us these songs evoke "smoking schwag behind the grocery store, drinking cream from a gas station with your first love".

And it all unrolls from the outset, this album's opening track a honeyed sway held in the breeze, all those aforementioned reference-points caressed into something soulful and sad and sepia-toned so that all the surrounding noise fades away to leave you right there, right in the aching heart of it.

Not so much country-tinged as country-scorched. Burned by it. Playful at times, but here, on its introduction, just perfectly imperfect, creaking at the seams (aren't we all), under the weight; the last throes of summer falling away over the hill as you notice the shift in the season for the first time, the colour in the leaves. And you can't hold on to it, no matter how hard you try.

'Autumn' is taken from Tobacco City's new LP Horses, out now (Bandcamp)

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