Since she started making solo records in 1995, Holly Golightly's released somewhere between seven and eleven albums\x97depending on how you count the live recordings, the singles collection, the covers, and the collaborations. This might seem prolific in the modern sense, but a look at the cover art of her Singles Round-Up lays the intentions of Holly's career pretty much bare: she works something like the early rhythm and blues and country artists she'd appear to love, the sort whose record-store bins are filled with any number of releases packaging singles, standards, sessions, and cross-genre offerings. Holly's personal output of this stuff has overflowed with charming little things\x97but it still feels like her following's extended beyond the usual cultists only far enough to include record store clerks and fellow musicians, all of whom you can imagine loudly complaining about what a shame that is. People like albums these days; how far can you get working like a career singer from 1959?
Well: this year has the potential to change that, though I wouldx92t hold my breath for anything huge. What happened was that Holly's cadre of fellow-musician devotees grew to include the White Stripes, who saw fit to introduce her to a Stripes-sized mainstream audience with a vocal slot on Elephant's \x93It's True That We Love One Another.\x94 The liner for Truly She is None Other even verges on the mutual backslapping of novelists by including a lengthy joke of a blurb from Jack: \x93Miss Holly Golightly comes to my house sometimes on Sunday, beautiful as the wind that blew her in. . . . Is Holly wool? If she is, then am I a bucket of water?\x94
Given her on-record persona, it's hard to imagine Holly caring much about attention, but this album does sort of sound like she's ready to come out into the light: for one thing, it runs slightly more like An Album than those in her back catalog, and for another, the recording\x97though stripped-down and naturalistic as ever\x97is a thousand times cleaner and more accessible than it's been in the past, like it's put on a nice clean dress for the company. The downside to this is that she sounds like she's on her best behavior; the songs stay awfully polite and sprightly for someone who's so good at sounding sinister. The upside is that underneath that dress, ready to impress strangers, Holly's still pretty near top form.
And Holly in top form has, historically, really been something. Her approach to genre, floatily eclectic as it can be, always comes across as remarkably simple: from the girl-group garage of Thee Headcoatees, where she got her start, Holly drifted over to sounding like both sides of the segregated South. Languid juke-joint blues, department-store calico country, smoky old rhythm and blues and girl-group rock'x92roll; it's all been rendered in the echoing two-microphone style you'd guess from those retro album covers, all soft creaky drum kits and trebly guitar twang and the now-dusty feeling of brightly-covered LPs from Memphis. She doesx92t even \x93cover\x94 other people's songs so much as she sings them like standards, rich favorites for yet another dive bar: Lee Hazlewood, Willy Dixon, or a gloriously evil-sounding Ike Turner run-through (\x93Your Love is Mine\x94) that's right up there with the Shangri-La-rock of \x93Virtually Happy\x94 as one of the high points of her career.
There isx92t, maybe surprisingly, a \x93Virtually Happy\x94 on this more subtle record\x97nor, what with all that damned politeness, a \x93Your Love Is Mine\x94\x97just another set of sly and twangy ramblers and standards, this set touching down twice on the Kinks. But there's her voice, which never really changes and yet must, somehow, because it seems so right in every context, from Patsy Cline to Big Maybelle and mostly something oddly in between: her interpretations of other people's songs arex92t about proving that her record collectiox92s older than yours, but about the seemingly forgotten fact that a good vocal performance rewrites everything that really matters about a song. Jack White rhapsodizes about her singing in the liner, and I'm not sure I'd be able to be much clearer: when that voice meets up with her sharpest lyrics, Holly's moods get exactly as alluring as those of her namesake.
And the songs here, while they may lack the immediate killer, are about as sharp as Holly's been before: perfectly keening girl-group harmonies on \x93Without You Here,\x94 perfectly Staxy r&b; on \x93You Have Yet to Win,\x94 Texan waltz on \x93Sent,\x94 lyrics that giggle and bite. Holly's tunes tend to make the same three points as most torch, blues, and country songs: (a) you're no good, she's glad you're gone, and she might possibly be plotting some form of revenge; (b) she's no good, you'd better get going, and you'd better stay out of her way; and (c) she's no good, you're no good, and maybe that's why she cax92t live without you. You'd be surprised how those stories never get old.
I dox92t know whether that White Stripes cameo will expand Holly Golightly's territory on the indie-rocker's map; I dox92t know whether she can become the Saturday-night whisky-drinking chanteuse or the Sunday-morning armchair crooner of those who arex92t about to thumb through the stacks of old LPs. But if this album really is going to be the outfit Holly's wearing when the company shows up, she should be pleased with herself: it's a little more subdued than many of us might like, but it's awfully presentable. Maybe if we all stick around and bring her enough drinks, she'll loosen back up again.
