“This is a song about when you feel good but you already know you’re gonna feel bad,” says Katy Beth Young AKA Tenderness, introducing the exquisitely bittersweet “Salt Flats”. She pauses for a beat before adding: “And it’s my happiest song!”
Luckily, at the revived Club Uncut, we are mad for sadness. Beginning her captivating solo set with homesick Appalachian folk song “The Very Day I’m Gone”, Young goes on to reveal herself as the millennial Patsy Cline, the casually magnificent swoop of her voice turning romantic disappointment and quarter-life ennui into something almost euphoric.
The Blue Basement holds good memories for Young. It was here (at a show by Nashville singer-songwriter Erin Rae) that she came across pedal steel player Harry Bohay, who went on to help define the Tenderness sound. Bohay isn’t here tonight, so Young asks us to imagine him playing along to “Saturday Morning”. But the truth is, we don’t need to – her vocal melody is transporting enough by itself, even as it describes yet another foundering relationship.
It might get darker. Chris Eckman’s music is stark and sorrowful, shot through with the desolation of long, chilly nights alone – which of course only makes it more compelling. “Genevieve”, the opening number from last year’s terrific The Land We Knew The Best, describes a love affair in terms so vivid and final that you know his pleas for reconciliation are hopeless. “Wars are won by those who quit / And leave dead dreams behind,” Eckman sings ruefully.
“Buttercup” is ostensibly more upbeat, but contains further sage advice for anyone enjoying themselves a little too much: “The good times are the hard times half-remembered.”
There is a change of pace as he plays an old Walkabouts number “The Stopping-Off Place”, later covered by Townes Van Zandt. “Which apart from being a great honour,” says Eckman, “proves that I had stolen all of it from him.” And then, especially for us, a real treat: a suitably intense take on Neil Young’s “On The Beach”, first covered by The Walkabouts in 1989 and which subsequently appeared on Uncut’s very first Sounds Of The New West CD in 1998. Right now, its sense of acute disillusionment feels more potent than ever: “The world is turnin’ / I hope it don’t turn away…”
Catalan singer-songwriter Joana Serrat finally lets some sunshine in, appearing here with her London-based band, The Sweet Nothings. Heartbreak and regret are still major themes, but offset by Serrat’s natural positivity and joie de vivre.
The new songs she premieres here are the first she’s written in full collaboration with the band, lending them a rich, dreamy quality that leans into her shoegaze influences. Thanks to the red Rickenbacker jangles of guitarist Sam Ferman, there’s even one that winningly resembles the indie-pop sugar rush of “Velocity Girl” (both the Primal Scream song and the band named after it).
It feels like Serrat has really hit upon something special with this new sound, packed with warm sentiment and a pleasing Floydian whoosh. She’s not one for protest songs, but can’t resist a quick call to “tear down the patriarchy!” before finishing with a rousing version of her signature number, “Take Me Back Where I Belong” – which, she confesses, “is basically making music onstage”. Conveniently, her happy place is ours too.