Flo Morrissey and Matthew E White - Gentlewoman, Ruby Man review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

The Guardian 80

On a wildly eclectic set of cover versions – everything from the Velvet Underground to the Bee Gees – the duo warp the originals into something new, strange and wonderful

Gentlewoman, Ruby Man is an album born of a moment of serendipity. Virginia-based auteur Matthew E White first encountered 21-year-old London singer-songwriter Flo Morrissey when the first track taken from his 2015 album Fresh Blood was reviewed next to her debut single, Pages of Gold, in this newspaper. Intrigued by the writer comparing her to, as he put it, “all the right people” (Karen Dalton and Jackson C Frank, among others), he sought her out. An email correspondence turned into an appearance together at a Barbican tribute concert for the late Lee Hazlewood, and that duet has now turned into an album’s worth of covers.

Given that they started out singing Some Velvet Morning, you might reasonably expect the shadow of Hazlewood and his muse Nancy Sinatra to hang heavy over subsequent proceedings. For one thing, Hazlewood’s lush, heady “cowboy psychedelia” is among the influences on the sound that comes out of Spacebomb – the studio, complete with house band, that White co-founded in 2010. And for another, if you’re going to do an album’s worth of duets, you could do worse than take your cues from the intriguing, witty relationship Hazlewood and Sinatra projected on their late 60s and early 70s collaborations. There’s certainly a vague hint of Nancy and Lee about Gentlewoman, Ruby Man’s opening take on Look at What the Light Did Now (previously a stark and fragile acoustic track by US indie singer-songwriter Kyle Feld, who records as Little Wing) and, especially, the brilliant reimagining of Frank Ocean’s Thinkin Bout You, with the original’s groggy synths replaced by a gorgeous 12-string guitar figure and its yearning, love-lost lyrics recast as a dialogue. You can hear the ghost of Hazlewood’s hangdog persona in White’s morning-after whisper, slipping from bravado to self-doubt in the face of Morrissey’s airy disinterest. But for the most part, the album avoids what you might call conversational duets. Indeed, its version of James Blake’s The Colour in Anything is virtually a solo performance by Morrissey, with White in the background providing spectral, wordless backing vocals.