Album Review: Long Distance by Holly Golightly

As a connoisseur of rare songs, garage rockabilly queen Holly Golightly would no doubt see the worth of this exercise in revision. Taking her 10 favourite solo songs, she reworks them with the aid of The Brokeoffs, her backing band for three albums now, who add a surly country-ish swing. So her venomous take of Sam & Dave’s ‘No Big Thing’ becomes lazily finger-flicking rootsy blues, the wonkily bitter ‘Eye For An Empty Heart’ acquires a lighthearted ‘Nashville Skyline’ Dylan roll and her vampish take on Little Willie John’s ‘My Love Is’ is stripped back to a banjo lament.

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It's almost never a good sign when artists start re-recording their old material; it usually suggests either they've run out of ideas or they're in need of a fast buck earned from songs their fans already love. It's hard to imagine either scenario motivating Holly Golightly, who has been producing music at an impressive pace since the 1990s and doesn't have any hits per se to exploit, but nevertheless, she's chosen to recycle ten songs from her earlier albums on 2012's Long Distance. Golightly's best and best-known work found her following a musical path where garage punk, ‘60s pop, smooth blues, and vocal jazz somehow run parallel, but since 2007, she's been working with multi-instrumentalist Lawyer Dave in a rough-hewn country-influenced combo called the Brokeoffs, and on Long Distance she recasts some of her old songs in her new style, adding a layer of grit and twang where she used to play chanteuse (albeit a street smart one with few pretensions).

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