Miss Holly And Lawyer Dave Make A Great One

Set back a little ways off of Highway 75 on the outskirts of Kansasville, Wisconsin is a big old house that some enterprising woman turned into a tavern. She named it “Wildlife Refuge.” On Saturday nights, yer likely to find an unlikely mix of college kids, aging local farmhands with less than ten fingers, out-of-town hipsters, and other assorted humans with a common interest in music, spirits, conversation, and a taste for something real. Area bands play with semi-regularity in what used to be a living room. Folks grab the comfy couches and easy chairs along the walls first, and usually by 11 p.m., a small crowd spills out onto the front porch. No one gives you a hard time for taking yer beer out there, and when an act draws a really big crowd, patrons will often mingle under giant oak trees in the wide front yard. With the right group of people, the right band, and warm summer breezes from the west, Wildlife Refuge can be a magical place — the kind of place you read about in books, the kind of place that seems impossible to actually exist outside of the imagination.

I want Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs to play Wildlife Refuge so very, very badly.

Holly Golightly and Lawyer Dave, they’d be the perfect pair of musicians to play that living room. They alternate between moonlit Southern Gothic, honky-tonk, gypsy junkyard jams, and stark country heartbreakers, all of which can be heard on No Help Coming, their newest and pretty much perfect set of songs. For a pair that does fairly uncomplicated American Roots music, Holly Golightly and Lawyer Dave have at least a dozen ways to dazzle the ears. First and foremost, Golightly has an instinctive sense of how to most effectively use her honey-dipped voice to fit the mood of the song she’s singing. She sweetly (but sharply) dismantles the town bizzybody in “Lord Knows We’re Drinking,” softly sings in a heartbreaking hush through “River Of Tears,” and snarls just enough to let you know she’s serious in the chorus of “Get Out My House.”

Lawyer Dave mostly sings harmony (with wonderful effectiveness) alongside Golightly, but occasionally takes a strong lead in tracks like “Under Arrest,” which chronicles the travails of the DUI experience in a small town. Wildly diverse percussion animates these tracks, with everything from washboards to tin cups to pots and pans. Lawyer Dave pulls a variety of sounds from his guitars to suit the mood. His slide guitar is an echo from the long-forgotten past in “The Only One,” and he ratchets up the tension of “The Rest Of Your Life” with spooky vibrola. Everything you hear on this record is exactly where it should be. It’s great.

Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs won’t be playing Wildlife Refuge (dammit) but they will be in Chicago at Beat Kitchen on Friday May 13, and on the following Sunday (May 15) they’ll be at Mad Planet in Milwaukee. I’m pretty sure I’m gonna go to the Mad Planet show. You should go too, and you should buy me a beer.