Quiet Color

by lora kolodny

On Friday, Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs performed a 90-minute set at The Mercury Lounge in New York City, consisting mostly of songs from their last two records You Can’t Buy A Gun When You’re Crying, and Dirt Don’t Hurt.

DON’T GO WIT DAD BY HOLLY GOLIGHTLY & THE BROKEOFFS:

While the name Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs sounds like a gaggle of players, on their current US tour the group performs as the scant two-man lineup of: the fantastically understated Lawyer Dave on guitars, slides, and foot-operated drum kit, who sings backup to Holly Golightly herself, a bed-headed British cowgirl with a hollowbody, and a smooth n’ smoky high-alto voice.

Absent from their seventeen-song set on Friday were Holly Golightly’s earlier, mod garage rock fame-makers. When fans called out requests for “There is An End,” a song that was featured in the Jim Jarmusch soundtrack to Broken Flowers, recorded solo and with garage rock trio, The Greenhornes, Golightly declined. “The trouble with that song is it is really bass-lead,” she said with a smile, pointing at Lawyer Dave and his rig of vintage steel string guitars. The axe man quipped “I haven’t learned to play dick-bass, yet.”

The duo’s acerbic but understated banter was as much a delight as their songs. They were quick to point out their own sound was like “Halloween,” and repeatedly mocked their own songs for covering well-tread country-blues topics like epic heartbreak, drinking and domestic violence.

“We don’t condone [domestic violence] but we’re awfully good at it,” Lawyer Dave joked introducing the recent single, “My .45,” a mid-tempo verse-trading ditty wherein two lovers threaten and insult each other. They sang in perfect, deadpan harmony, only occasionally letting a sly smile fly, “I hope you choke upon your coffee. I’m gonna drown you in your tea”

Somewhere between the rousing set opener “Everything You Touch,” about a kind of inverse King Midas who turns the world to stone, and the last twangy song of the set (pre-encore) “So Long,” Lawyer Dave paused to re-tune for the umpteenth time, calling his instrument an “asshole,” and urging Holly to order up a couple of beam-and-cokes. Fans and bar staff delivered many.

Holly admonished him, reminding him of the high remaining number of their tour dates. The duo’s self-effacing, verbal barbs are exchanged in a Texan accent (Dave’s) and an English accent (Holly’s), highlighting their ability to bring Southern musical traditions around the world to the punk rock hotbed of the UK, and back again.

THAT DEVIL BY HOLLY GOLIGHTLY & THE BROKEOFFS:

Though their music is complicated to play, and includes precise and slinky blues solos-like the one in the crowd-pleaser of the night, “Devil Do” – complicated finger pick rhythms, and tight, nuanced vocals, Golightly and Dave delivered perfection throughout. A few gracious comments about the country’s newly determined president elect caused the liberal, downtown audience to cheer. When one party pooper cried out “They’re all the same! Politicians are all the same!” Holly tsk-tsked in a nurturing tone, and said “You’ve got to have hope. Deep down you’ve got to have hope.” She then introduced “a suicide song,” “Black Night,” deadpan with a minute and adorable smirk.

The duo performed steadily, calmly, and smartly in the face of an amped up, bar-brawling, foot-stomping and flashbulb-snapping audience. It could have been a scene in the original Blues Brothers movie.

Live, Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs evoke the stylistic singularity of Lennon-McCartney, the companionate stage presence of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, and the cool musical mastery of Jimmy Page. Based on their Mercury Lounge show, this duo is a force neither to be reckoned with, nor to be missed by anyone who cares about guitars, authenticity, acoustic blues or booze.