Dutchess & The Duke

It’s hard to imagine if you were born, say, after 1965, but there was a time before the elder statesmen of rock’n’roll had become parodies of themselves. Before Mick Jagger was known for fathering supermodels’ babies and strutting across the stage like the world’s wrinkliest peacock; before Lou Reed’s dark, downtowner guise was obsessed with more dangerous pursuits than tai chi; before Bob Dylan was picking up establishment prizes like a Pulitzer and an Oscar and being impersonated by Cate Blanchett. Many will never know the thrill of hearing those artists in their original context, but the debut by Seattle duo the Dutchess & the Duke is a pretty good consolation prize. The 10-track album celebrates the time before those personalities became personas and those musical styles became canonical. The purity of spirit that Kimberly Morrison (the titular Dutchess) and Jesse Lortz (her childhood friend and Duke) bring to this spare collection of bluesy ditties makes them sound as strange and fresh as the Velvet Underground must’ve sounded to ears unaccustomed to their kind of menacing sexual deadpan, yet the duo injects their songs with just enough punk spirit to remind us of how raw those early records really were.

But She’s The Dutchess, He’s The Duke is not just a walk down memory lane. It’s ingredients are few— sexy, gritty male vocals, some sweetly sung co-ed harmonies, nimbly finger-picked acousti-blues guitar, restrained (if any) percussion— but its magic is palpable. Perhaps it’s due to the intimacy of recording on an 8-track, but though every song is reminiscent of one you’ve heard before, they have a sense of immediacy and audible grit. It actually sounds as if you’re hearing them from inside the studio as they are being taped. The vocals are recorded at such close range that they are almost tinny, and you can practically visualize Morrison and Lortz brushing their lips against the microphones as they sing. Instead of Pro Tools perfection, there is an organic grunginess to the production that comes from the voices bleeding into the guitars and the guitars, in turn, spilling into the brassy tambourines.

Though «Reservoir Park», the album’s opener, is classic Stones, with crisp handclaps punctuating the rootsy, «Ruby Tuesday»-worthy guitar as Lortz’s swaggers and moans against Morrison’s naked, wistful mezzo-soprano, the album isn’t entirely Glimmer Twins influenced. «The Prisoner» finds them taking on shades of Leonard Cohen, with Lortz allowing his libidinous vocal drone to dwell in its lowest, louchest register. Morrison’s voice sounds ethereal next to her partner’s earthy tones, matching the incongruously bright timbre of the hippie-ish flute accompaniment (which is, by the way, one of the only times the arrangements on the album are broader than just guitar and tambourine). On «Back to Me», the Dutchess & the Duke tease us with a riff on the Dylan’s «Hurricane» chord progression, and later, on «Mary» with its repeated, rolling, «You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away» guitar line, they manage to make a Dylan homage out of a Dylan homage.

Everyone is going to say that these faux royals sound timeless because they play the sounds of the past with the adventurous spirit of the future, but they’ll be wrong. The Dutchess & the Duke have released a record that’s calculatedly crafted to sound dated, and that makes it— in more ways than one— sound classic.