“I’m pretty nervous tonight,” Nancy Wallace confesses to a packed Borderline. “I can see the whites of your eyes,” she tells the people in front of her, all of them staring in her direction, rapt as ecstatics, transported, hanging on her every word. There was really no need for Wallace to worry. Three songs into a brief set, drawn from both traditional sources and songs from her recent solo album, Old Stories, she has the audience quite mesmerised, to the extent that a hush falls over the crowd moments into her first number, one of those dark traditional ballads that end up with people in graves, unhappy lives all they’ve left behind, the kind of cheerless fatalism that makes you think of Thomas Hardy and consumptives coughing blood. The grim stuff doesn’t stop here fans of this kind of spectral trad-folk bleakness will doubtless be thrilled to discover. Even a song as superficially pretty as “Many Years” has a disfiguring undertow of loss and elsewhere the songs she sings puts you in mind of forlorn lasses, weeping at gravesides, the weather wet around them, boggy landscapes hung with mist, paupers limping by, children with rickets and stumps for teeth. She’s only on stage for about half an hour, but takes the audience in that time somewhere else entirely and then is gone herself. So now here’s William Elliott Whitmore, his banjo, tattoos and hoarse blues holler, the audience already rowdy and getting rowdier still as Elliott lifts a beer in salute, sits himself down in an ornate wooden chair that looks like the kind of thing you’d find on the back porch of a shack somewhere in the Mississippi Delta and starts bellowing, no other word for the noise he’s making, which is in turn accompanied by much thigh-slapping and noisy foot-stomping, Whitmore making the rowdy most of the limited resources he evidently prefers. The crowd are hooting for more before he’s even finished, surprisingly energised by Whitmore’s songs, most of which when they aren’t about dying seem to be about what happens next, as on “Digging My Grave”, one of many songs in his repertoire about glum death, the big light going out for keeps, the maggoty termination of things. There’s a rousing gospel roar to “Lift My Jug” that further enlivens his clearly besotted fans, some of whom are tempted to sing along, perhaps encouraged by the bottle of what from where I’m standing, which is too far away for a taste, looks like a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that Whitmore offers them. “Would anyone like a sip of this?” he asks, his voice like something malfunctioning badly under the beat-up bonnet of an old truck, not quite a death rattle but heading in the right direction. “Don’t put the cap back on it,” he further instructs. “Keep passing it.” The faithful at the front dutifully obey, although several numbers later, Elliott appears disappointed when the bottle’s handed back to him, not quite empty. Elliott plays the part of the blues hobo well enough, and certainly looks the part. But as with, say, Seasick Steve there’s a hint of pantomime here, a kind of mugging, an overdoing of gruff veracities that occasionally grates. The audience lap it up, though, can’t get enough of it in fact. And it’s difficult in the end not to be swept along by a run of songs like “Hell Or High Water”, “Johnny Law” and “Old Devils” – all from Whitmore’s recent Animals In The Dark album – which come towards the end of another fine Club Uncut night. We’ll be back here again, on May 11, for Pink Mountaintops. See you then.

There was allegedly a leak of the new Dirty Projectors album a couple of days ago, which means that yet again my dithering has robbed me of blogging exclusivity. The thing is, as I’ve mentioned a few times over the past month, I’ve been finding “Bitte Orca”, like its predecessors, somewhat intriguing and uncrackable. Today, I think I’m getting closer to understanding it. The initial problem with David Longstreth and his band, I’ve always suspected, is that they’re so concerned with the cerebral innovations of their music that they sometimes privilege complexity, regardless of the effect it might have on their potency. I’m obviously not against cleverness in music, but with the Dirty Projectors it can be hard to see beyond that cleverness, as if the act of being clever is an artistic end in itself. I had a similar problem with “The Drift”: I like Scott Walker – and latterday Scott Walker – very much, but that record seemed stymied by such an ostentatious display of intellectual chops. “Bitte Orca” is, clearly, nowhere near as difficult a record as that. Listening to it again and again in the Uncut office, we’ve heard traces of Yes, Polvo, Scritti Politti, XTC and Talking Heads (two bands, actually, I’ve never liked quite as much as I’ve wanted to; a clue, perhaps), African hi-life, contemporary R&B, post-rock and Prince. The last song, “Fluorescent Half Dome”, is a diaphanous, ambulatory slow jam that’s more or less midway between “Nothing Compares 2 U” and “The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker”. There are some pretty amazing things here, for sure. “Temecula Sunrise”, for instance, starts off with some acoustic fingerpicking but, rapidly, it seems as if the player is channelling Toumani Diabaté as much as John Fahey, before sliding into the sort of dislocated post-pop which used to be the trademark of The Sea And Cake. Two songs in the centre of “Bitte Orca” stand out, though. One is the first single, “Stillness Is The Move”, a brittle and inventive reconfiguration of Aaliyah songs like “One In A Million” or “We Need A Resolution”; a comparison that resonates all the more thanks to Amber Coffman’s calmly soulful lead vocal. Straight after comes “Two Doves”, a gorgeous chamber folk-pop song, sung by Angel Deradoorian, that isn’t a million miles from a Joanna Newsom piece. It’s the immediate pleasure to be had from these two songs, however, which reveals something more about my response to the rest of “Bitte Orca”, and to the Dirty Projectors’ work in general. They’re the only two songs where Longstreth doesn’t take the lead – which suggests that my difficulty with the band might not be because of their theoretical rigour, but is down to one of the simplest, and hardest-to-explain, negative reactions you can have to music; I just don’t like the singer’s voice too much. Ironically, Longstreth is probably more reined-in here than on previous albums, and on paper his voice – a mix of Green Gartside and Jeff Buckley, crudely – should be appealing. Longstreth, though, has a capricious way with a vocal melody, and sometimes it can sound like Antony Hegarty improvising to a slightly different tune than the one which we’re hearing. I don’t doubt Longstreth has brilliant reasons for singing this way, perhaps rooted in his rare academic understanding of how music and composition works - or can work. But while it’s undoubtedly interesting, and often compelling, I’m not sure how much I actually like it. This is the recurrent issue I have with the Dirty Projectors: however much I struggle, there’s something about this band and their music that makes me want to play it again and again, to try and get to the bottom of it. Maybe I need, like all the evangelists tell me, to see them live?