- The thing I like best about Hana & Jessie-Lee (and their full band mode Hana & Jessie-Lee's Bad Habits) is also the thing which makes them a bit difficult to talk about. The Adelaide girls bill themselves as an alt-country duo, but everytime I listen to them it somehow fails to add up. Hana’s husky, beat up voice will shriek like a cousin to the soulful roar of Janis Joplin. Then an Appalachian fiddle will start the folk revival going. Shortly thereafter the muted brass section will push the action into a smokey vaudeville bar. Since Hana & Jessie-Lee seem utterly incapable of sticking it out in any particular style for more than a minute or two, a furiously picked out blues guitar solo will barge in before the whole cavalcade recapitulates in lush, Tammy Wynette style country. You can see why it makes them a bit difficult to describe, yeah?

If you listened to their most recent single, Eight Tonne Shackles you’d know that every one of those things happened in that song. It was a blinder: rich and completely confusing. I had to spend a bit of time with their debut full-length before I could come to terms with what exactly it is they do. It’s a gorgeous and, of course, highly varied piece of work. I’m not entirely sure where Hana & Jessie-Lee got all the people to play it: I know that members of their former honky-tonk country band, The Sloe Ruin, helped out, but even that doesn’t seem quite enough.

There’s so much: from the urgent folk-country of first single Maryses To Pieces straight on into the blue-eyed soul of Everytime You Come Around. The record slips down through the slow, soulful, country and melancholy dirge that is Road To Ruin before you’re lifted up by the bittersweet roots-pop of Avalanche. The soulful sadness really rears its head as Hana bellows over the top of the slow, twilight waltz of the album’s title track. Southlands’ penultimate number, These Shambles is a celebration of free-wheeling, down and outers, the happy go lucky ramblers that so much of this sort of music was dedicated to, back in the ‘60s. If there’s one band representing that kind of fusion tradition which Hana & Jessie Lee are tapping into, it’s The Band and I hear them so strongly in this number. I imagine them, along with the likes of Jefferson Airplane, Joe Cocker, Creedence, Janis Joplin and all the rest, on an endless folk-blues-country-psych festival circuit, all soaking up each other’s influences, the shared mythology and a lake of booze and drugs.

In the world of endless musical revival it seems like no genre can escape being flogged to death, sometimes several times over. Yet the roots-rock-pop of the ‘60s and ‘70s seems to have been given less rear-view attention than other styles. That may be at least partly because, with all its disparate influences, it’s quite hard to even get it properly, never mind master it.

There seem to be a growing number of bands in Australia that do actually get it, although, really, you can still count them on the fingers of one hand: Burn Antares, Saint Jude, Em Burrows & The Bearded Rainbow and recently The Meltdown. I’m very happy to have Hana & Jessie-Lee's Bad Habits to take the fifth finger spot in that equation. Lush and so musically deep, with just the right tarnished and battered finish: they’re like that amazing old record you found in the fifty cent bin at the op-shop. This is bit of yesterday is certainly well worth digging up.

- Chris Cobcroft.