Album Review: All Her Fault by Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs

British-born garage rock queen Holly Golightly has a long history of throwing down raw, scuffy recordings at a prolific rate, with some of her best albums being gorgeously unpolished classics that don't fuss with much more than the bare bones of rock & roll. The quick and dirty productions often captured an electric spontaneity and highlighted the various layers of humor, pathos, and gritty attitude in Golightly's one-of-a-kind voice. All Her Fault, the seventh full-length from Golightly and her partner Lawyer Dave (the sole member of "the Brokeoffs"), took a much different path, with the recording process stretching out over a series of many months, hindered by day jobs, summer thunderstorms, and intermittent power outages.

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I’ve probably said it before elsewhere on PopMatters, but country, roots, Americana – whatever you want to call it – is a hard genre to mess up. Part of the reason, I believe, is because the genre (genres?) attracts the singer-songwriter demographic, those who pay attention to skill and craft. So with so many artists of talent knocking the door of Nashville down, everyone is trying to raise the bar on what, on the surface, seems to be a very simple and non-complex and direct mode of songwriting.

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Country music is in a strange place. During its long, adventurous existence, it has gone from the woods, through cheatin’ hearts and ended up where it is now: one of the most popular genres in the world and farther away from its roots than it has ever been. Sure, a few like Wayne “The Train” Hancock and Justin Townes Earle try to keep the flame alive but for most, the airwaves are dominated by the Taylor Swift, Blake Shelton and Luke Bryan asses.

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