Last summer I did a load of stupid things, but one of the stupider things I did was that I forgot to write about this album. I mean, I listened to it most days for a few weeks, me and my wife and a musician friend of ours who listened to it with his head cocked in that position that I recognise well as half admiration and half seething jealousy that someone else got there first and a bit better and with a really good honky-tonk pianist. And I was writing most days too. But somehow I neglected to write about Andre Ethier’s self-titled solo album, which I think came out around last July over here. See, I don’t even know.

It was kinda hard to care about specifics when Ethier’s whisky-gargling tones were the accompaniment to what felt like the last summer of sleazy, sore-headed not-that-much-fun-at-all-really fun I was ever gonna have. I didn’t reel home at 6am in a torn silk dress and kick off my boots and crack open a beer and think to myself, gosh, this Canadian boy from that garage rock band the Deadly Snakes has made a rather fine piece of dirty country blues, hasn’t he. I just thought to myself, should I wake up my wife so we can get a bit more pissed and sing close harmony versions of Hearts On Fire? Or possibly, hey, shall I write me a nihilistic song of my own hahaha? Then when I’d woken up and sobered up the next day, I didn’t think, wow, must write about the scope of Christopher Sandes’ piano playing and the great rhythm section on that Andre Ethier album. I just thought, oh jesus god I have a magazine to help run, and a gig to practise for and two jobs on top of that - better get cracking, eh? Oh and, ouch.

A whole year later, I’m thinking, well, was it such a good album after all? Was it just, in fact, great drinking music? Ethier’s album both was - and is - great drinking music, it’s true. It’s even been compared to Bob fucking Dylan, which, as I know from working in a pub with a “great jukebox” (ie, there’s loads of Dylan and Tom Waits on it for 32 year old middle class men to put on when they’ve had three pints and feel lachrymose. Great!), is supposed to be great drinking music, although personally Dylan makes me wanna break glasses, not sup enigmatically from them. But yeah. I concede that there are similarities. The rough-textured voice, the so-charming love/hate attitude towards the ladies, the moments of minimal folk hollering and the shambling bar-room honky-tonkiness overlaid with what’s obviously a smart, textually aware mind - all these could, if you wanted to, make you think of Dylan. But who the hell wants to think of Dylan? I mean, really? When you could think of this instead. When you could drink to this instead.

This album works with alcohol because it’s loose, first and foremost, but because it never falls apart, gets undignified, bursts into tears or loses its keys. The musicians sound a little drunk themselves, but in a fantasy drunk way: the kind of drunk that makes you produce ragged works of laid-back genius and makes girls want to save your life. The songs are simple and memorable and the lyrics direct and suggestive in equal measure, right from the off, as Ethier shows up on your doorstep with a chorus of “Oh…won’t you let me…put my suitcase down…” He’s been sleepin’ outdoors and he’s tired and there’s no one who could love you more than he does, he says, so what’re you gonna do? Come on in, Andre. We got two bottles of red for a fiver.

Once you’re ensconsed together in mutual self-indulgence, lips sticky from cheap booze, it’s all downhill from there, and sweetly so. Ethier entertains you with some proper old-school Americana about thieving and lying and gettin’ hanged for your crimes and you nod your head to the shuffly drums that sound like they’re made out of junk shop chairs. He puts the fear of god into you with ‘Sinners”: “The ground it rots beneath us, and our roots are overgrown,” he testifies, amid vignettes about wasp’s nests and walking sticks played out over a stomping bassline and a Nicky Hopkins-style waterfall of burlesque piano. He tells you he just burnt his baby’s bed (after stealing her shoes, obv). He even asks you to sweep up after him. And you love it.

The wry amorality of Andre Ethier’s lyrics coupled with the regretful, rueful lilt of the melodies and rhythms slips down as easy as a bottle of good bourbon. His immersion in the mores and modes of a bygone time are so complete and relaxed (and so darn funny in places) that they cause very little in the way of what I call retro discomfiture, that being the feeling you get when someone reappropriates old musical idioms like they’re trying to win a prize for precision and adds nothing of their own. No, Ethier reappropriates lovingly and skilfully, but carelessly (sluttishly, if you will), and he does it because it’s fun, despite the death and desertion and capital punishment going on in his songs. And like TK Webb, whose recent evocation of Kansas City blues sparked in my imagination like a busted neon sign, Ethier works some kind of transmutational magic into what are ostensibly straightforward country blues songs, weaving an instant classicism into tracks like ‘Honey Drips, Butter Runs’ (“and honey, you better run…”).In drinking terms, it’s the sonic equivalent of looking around you, as if through a smeared lens, and feeling as if you’re in a poem, a story a song. Feeling as if the person who shares the bottle, whose sleepy eyes meet yours over the refilled glasses, is the best friend you ever had.

But let’s not push the metaphor too far, because I listen to Ethier today punctuated and stimulated by nothing stronger than a pot of coffee and a happy heart. Last summer’s chaos withers in this summer’s bright, sweet light like a vampire in the dawn. Still Sandes’ beautifully confident piano tickles my toes, and the low twang of the stand-up bass stirs the corners of my mouth in a smile. And Andre Ethier’s dirty, musteline voice still gladdens and excites like the friend you’re always pleased to see. Whatever the hell they persuade you to do next.

So I’m sorry that time - and I - seem to have forgot this album. It’s great, whatever your pleasure. Go get it, while there’s still some summer left.