Club Uncut’s final night in Brighton can’t quite match the high of Josh T. Pearson’s performance on Friday, but a strong, diverse bill of female talent doesn’t disappoint. Jo Bartlett is best known as half, with Danny Hagan, of folk-pop duo It’s Jo And Danny. The couple have spent the last few years running the Green Man festival, but Barttlett’s solo debut Upheaval is a promising return to what was once the day-job. Obsessive, lost love’s the theme, as when she sings on “Innocence”: “For you I would gladly hang, but you gave me up for dead”. “Kenvig Hill” is a tribute to the South Wales beauty spot Howard Marks calls home. Iceland’s Olof Arnalds (who’s worked with Bjork, of course), is more arresting. Whether singing in Icelandic or English, she picks her way through words with child-like fascination, making her cover of Dylan’s “She Belongs To Me” sound as if she’s just written it. Last year’s “Crazy Car” is equally heartfelt, a plea to a friend not to leave her and the past they have shared. Her off-beat, unaffected charm makes even Icelandic folk’s freakier corners hard to resist The Secret Sisters are Alabaman siblings Laura and Lydia Rogers. They grew up harmonising to the Everly Brothers, and are so wholesomely out of time they could be the Andrews Sisters. Cornpone is the word that comes to mind, and the on-stage sisterly spats seemed a little too well-rehearsed. T-Bone Burnett’s produced them and Elvis Costello’s sung with them, doubtless seeing them as living embodiments of the country lineage he investigated on Almost Blue. This isn’t, though, the Old, Weird America but the Old, White-bread one, which isn’t to dismiss the genuineness of their sunny, God-fearing attitude, or their committed effectiveness on Patsy Cline’s “Leaving On Your Mind”, and especially the Gospel standard “In The Sweet By and By”. This is country’s non-alternative wing, the part most Americans actually like. The lack of irony or subtext, from sisters who are clearly no fools, is refreshing in its way. Alela Diane, though, gives you something tougher to bite on. A Nevada City associate of Joanna Newsom, she’s on the last night of a long tour with her band, but they have enough left in the tank for a stately, powerful show. “Rising Greatness” is a particular highlight, and her band, with her father on lead guitar, is excellent. They finish Club Uncut’s latest Brighton adventure in satisfying style. NICK HASTED

“I’m tired,” Josh T. Pearson says. “It’s been a long life. I don’t even know what day of the week it is...” Someone in the crowd tells him the day and the date. “Friday the 13th?” he wryly muses, as if his life has been full of nothing but such days of potential reckoning in the ten long years since his band Lift To Experience released their fearsome album, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, and soon after blew apart. That record imagined humanity making its last stand in Texas during the apocalypse. Pearson’s eventual follow-up Last Of The Country Gentlemen considers a recent relationship in similar terms. There’s the rare sense tonight of every bitter, funny, helpless word mattering, because they’re being pulled up from a harrowing place and being relived on stage. Pearson’s a big, lean, bearded Texan, who’d be imposing if he wasn’t so soft-spoken, funny and bashfully apologetic. Right until he starts singing, anyway. “OK, here we go, thank y’all,” is all the warning we get. “Sweetheart I Ain’t Your Christ” then reads the riot act to a woman, letting her know the unhappy place their relationship’s at. “Woman When I’ve Raised Hell” describes a state of brewing violence, but it becomes obvious he’s dangerous because he’s a straying, pathetic man, cornered and raging because he’s in the wrong. “I said honestly...” he murmurs wretchedly, trying to clamber out of the hole he’s dug. His hand evenly strokes his hugely amped acoustic guitar. “Are there any ladies here?” he enquires a little later. “Run!” he advises them, darkly. “I come from a long line in a history of dreamers,” Pearson begins “Country Dumb”, “each one more tired than the one before.” It could be the anthem for a certain sort of bottom-barrel American loser, and there are echoes as he strums of some old Dixie standard. Eyes shut, he sways away from the microphone, then walks up to it, smashing the guitar as he explains: “There are reasons I was alone when I met you...” Around this suddenly fragile-looking man in a white T-shirt the venue’s gone dark. On a Friday night, every single person in it’s silently listening. Pearson’s absently playing chords one-handed on the guitar’s neck as he finishes. The applause hardly seems to reach him, making you think of Dylan’s comment on Blood On The Tracks: “A lot of people tell me they enjoyed that album. It’s hard for me to relate to people enjoying that kind of pain.” After one final song, though, “Thou Art Loosed”, the wave of cheers really touches Pearson. It’s good he gets some reward, beyond the couple of people every night who thank him because they’ve been though something similar and his songs really help. The idea that got a lot of us into rock music, that there’s something at stake in it beyond showbiz and a pretty tune, burns as strongly as it ever has afterwards. Pearson apologises for missing a previous Club Uncut – legal problems, apparently – but this one will be remembered for a long time. Villagers, who wrap things up around half-midnight, draw an even bigger crowd. Conor O’Brien is a poor man’s Conor Oberst to some, but is more clearly part of a lineage you can trace back to the late ‘60s poetic streams of Van Morrison and Neil Young. “Becoming A Jackal”, up for an Ivor Novello this week, remains the fine song it was when it came out a year ago on the album Villagers are still promoting, but there are enough new songs tonight to suggest O’Brien would rather be moving on, and his band are fiery. Earlier, Heavenly-signed English husband and wife duo Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou offer one really gripping song, “The Stargazers’ Gutter”. Allusive and historical (it seems to take in the whole ‘60s bohemian generation’s fate), it gives its characters and listeners healing shelter from the storm it describes. “England” is similarly ambitious, but disappoints by comparison. Before them, Dean McPhee’s treated guitar instrumentals find him banging the back of its neck which makes a sound like a clanging iron door, and conjuring whale-song echoes. “Calming,” Josh Pearson approvingly comments, watching from the crowd. Afterwards, though, it’s hard to remember anyone but him. NICK HASTED