The greatest duet album about marital break-up is George Jones’s and Tammy Wynette’s Golden Ring. It was released in 1976, one year after the country stars had divorced each other in real life. Jones was a violent alcoholic who, according to Wynette, once threatened her with a loaded gun. But they reunited for Golden Ring, which, amid the ruins of their marriage, became their most successful album as singing partners.
Its title track is a classic example of Nashville storytelling about a couple buying a wedding ring from a pawnshop in Chicago. After their marriage fails the ring ends up back in the pawnshop, where another couple buy it. The cycle of weddings and heartbreak goes endlessly onwards. “One thing’s for certain,” Jones sings, voicing the role of the angry wife flinging the ring to the floor, “I don’t love you anymore.”
Forty-five years, later the golden ring has been gathered up by another singing duo, Primal Scream’s singer Bobby Gillespie and his counterpart from post-punk band Savages, Jehnny Beth. Their joint album Utopian Ashes is themed around the idea of a failing marriage between a hard-living man and his disillusioned wife. Its opening track “Chase It Down” contains an overt nod to Jones and Wynette.
“I don’t even love you anymore,” Gillespie sings, echoing the dismal sentiment from “Golden Ring”. The indie veteran sounds washed-out and enfeebled. In contrast, Beth sings her part briskly. Both swap country-music storytelling for rock clichés about redemption and seizing the moment. The posturing is typical of each singer. But the music is more engaging than the routine riffage that often accompanies it — especially in the work of Primal Scream.
Gillespie’s band, makers of 1991’s sublime Screamadelica, have been on a downwards spiral since 2006’s Riot City Blues. For Utopian Ashes, he’s joined by Scream bandmates Andrew Innes on guitar, Martin Duffy on keyboards and drummer Darrin Mooney. Beth’s longstanding collaborator Johnny Hostile plays bass. Although Gillespie and Beth go about their roles with characteristic self-seriousness, the songs have the sense of lightness that a side project can bring.
“Remember We Were Lovers” is a country-soul ballad that builds into a cosmic, horn-fuelled epic. “You Can Trust Me Now” is a nicely judged country-rock weepie. “Your Heart Will Always Be Broken” is a Rolling Stones-style piano-rocker, a customary lodestar for Primal Scream. “English Town” has the handsome gloom of a 1960s Scott Walker song, with a touch of the chanson tradition of Beth’s native France.
The overall storyline of the collapsing marriage doesn’t register strongly. Gillespie and Beth, unconnected romantically in real life, aren’t convincing as a married duo. But notwithstanding its narrative gaps, Utopian Ashes makes for a diverting act of homage, solidly cast in the mould of bygone duet albums such as Golden Ring.
★★★☆☆
‘Utopian Ashes’ is released by Third Man Records