Without doubt one of the finest exponents of alt-country to come from these fair isles The Redlands Palomino Company are back with a new album Broken Carelessly, released through Clubhouse Records.
The band ‘fronted’ by wife and husband Hannah (guitar vocals) and Alex Elton-Wall (guitar vocals) with Dan Tilbury (drums), Rain (bass) and Dave Rothon (pedal steel) recorded the album over a over a six day period in an old Methodist Chapel in the Gloucestershire countryside, with most of the tracks nailed within a couple of takes, the intimacy of the recording environment affecting the whole process and allowing the band to flow and capture the essence of their live shows.
The band kick things of in style with opener…
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…In These Lines that opens out with a build to a trademark hook and is wonderfully accented by Hannah’s vocal and the pedal steel, track two lifts the tempo with Alex taking lead and Hannah joining him with one of my favourites up next the wonderful Everything I’m Not that keeps up the pace but with the lead switching back to Hannah whose voice never sounded so affecting – and with apologies to Alex it’s her lead vocals that really excel on the album, though Alex more than holds up his side of the bargain and it is of course the switching and interplay element that makes the album so engaging with Alex’s handling of the production making the very best of this.
The title track Broken Carelessly is up next a song which fittingly builds the track around the horse breed at the centre of the bands name, next up the band hit the ‘country’ switch and boom-chicka-boom there’s way through Don’t Ever Let Me Down with some bittersweet pedal steel carrying the melody, up next comes a track written by the purveyor of said pedal steel with echoes of The Byrds and Alex taking the lead on Dave’s song She Can Live Without You , the mood softens and the tempo is reigned-in to a different type of reflection on the next pair of track’s Scattered Earth and Perfect Forever reinforcing the fact the band are no one trick genre pony, in fact the next pair of tracks attest to this as we hear the band jumping from the rootsy bar-room Floorboard George with Alex on lead vocal to the albums least typical TRPC song the gorgeous Swim, here’s Hannah on the recording.