Scotland’s Loch Lomond space isn’t commonly the locale just one thinks of when considering barn-stomping nation and rootsy Americana, but Dumbartonshire people 6-piece Have Mercy Las Vegas has spent the last 10 a long time indulging in their shared passion for bluegrass pop, amassing an at any time-increasing fanbase and headlining a mainstage at Eden Competition as well as advertising out their hometown’s Denny Civic Theatre together the way. Taking four several years to generate, new album Light-weight & Shade vegetation by itself firmly inside of the common territory of bluegrass melodrama as proffered on 2014’s That is Life, delivers nothing new, and feels fewer a studio album and additional a perfunctory doc of their are living act.

There’s no lack of enjoy across Gentle & Shade‘s hour size, an apparent enthusiasm for their craft carries their sophomore exertion some distance, fuelled by the straightforward magic of outdated mates playing tunes with each other is never ever with no question. This reliable, communal pleasure is curiously straight-jacketed by terribly light songcraft and a cautiously tame evasion of anything remotely resembling grit, suffering, or even the rusticness so widespread in country’s loaded heritage.

Music like ‘Formby’s Smile’ or ‘Kick Drum & Run’ are inoffensive toe-tappers that harmony precariously concerning honouring their adore of traditional folks and wavering shut to grating twee stomp, ‘She Looks Portuguese’ doing a dive bomb into the latter with its ukelele mawk. Lyrically also songwriter Crispin McAlpine usually provides strains which are too obvious for evocation and far too area for affecting depth. ‘Alive’s’ environmental paean simply listing his political irks or ‘First Dance’s’ previous line (“I’m glad you married me”) frustrates with their constrained peripheries of poetic grasp.

Have Mercy Las Vegas do control to harness extraordinary dust storms, welcome breaks from the album’s otherwise cloying character. ‘Costa’ eerily wanders The Joshua Tree‘s meditative plains, soaring involving stirring rock heft and brittle disquiet with an impressively cinematic lense. Twisted arrangements of haunted strings have ‘Hold Tight’s’ dusky depth, a bittersweet tease of a certainly wounded overall performance that details to the reliable depths the band could arrive at must they dare tread.

Not often straying from their nation formula, Gentle & Shade cannot ever fairly rid itself of the nagging deficiency of dimensions or thematic complexities 4 a long time in gestation must warrant. Maybe it doesn’t make a difference? Although the album exists in a mainly tepid output, the music contained will surely rating a lot of a reveller’s cherished pub memory or unforgettable hoe-down.

Observe ON Facebook // X // INSTAGRAM

A lot more RGM News In this article