Mark Pickerel And His Praying Hands

★★★

Rebel In The Rearview BANDCAMP. DL

Ex-Screaming Tree covers neo-torch singers’ songs and country mavericks.

For his fourth full-length with his Praying Hands collective, Mark Pickerel assembles an eclectic set of covers, refracted via his trademark blend of outlaw country ache and garage rock edge. Pickerel’s selection of songs is consistently inspired, his treatments perfectly tailored. His reading of Lucinda Williams’ Essence, a ballad equating love with drug addiction – debilitating and ecstatic in equal measures – is richly noir, Pickerel lending it a powerful Johnny Cash-esque burr, while an offbeat take of Old Brown Shoe reimagines The Beatles’ blackly comic gallop as mournful bar-side Americana. Best of the bunch is a smouldering cover of Back To Black, reupholstering Amy Winehouse’s neo-classic torch song with swooning country guitar and Pickerel’s deliciously regretful tone. Throughout, the combination of shimmering, melancholic tremolo and Pickerel’s parched twang delivers sides with enough period vibe to be a perfect fit on Quentin Tarantino’s next soundtrack.