DYLAN CARLSON
The
Hope, Brighton, 18th Oct
Early
on into this gig, Carlson makes a comment which sets the tone - about
being “a metalhead who became a folkie.” As a boyhood Led
Zeppelin fan I never felt that was a choice I had to make, but it
still sounds an intriguing journey to take. Regular readers... oh,
however many times I make that joke it never tires... regular readers
will know I
saw Carlson's day-job band Earth this spring, and was suitably
impressed. True, it was blues and country rock I detected
in them more than folk, but there was still a pointer towards things
nonny-nonny which might reward following.
Though
for the most part what's being revived here is the folk
revival – songs from Bert Jansch, Richard
Thompson, even the Kinks' 'Wicked Annabella'.
(Which Carlson suggests was what primed him for his conversion.)
The
instrumentation is pared down to guitar, vocals and a single drum,
but rather than taking things back to a folky simplicity, all are
overlaid with multiple effects. There's so much reverb on the singer
that when she clicks her fingers she's as loud as the drummer. She
sings in the 4AD style, all drama and allure, topped off by some
Rapunzel hair. (A sense probably accentuated by her never speaking to
the audience, and quite possibly not even looking at us.) Through the
treatment and affectation I'm not sure I'd have recognised she was
singing in English had I not known so many of the songs. Meanwhile
Carlson does pretty much what he always does – slow, laconic guitar
riffs, only one step away from drones.
Needless
to say, I am not some folk purist who objects to those who raid the
folk tradition for their own ends. Generations before have done that
very thing, in fact what we now look back upon as the folk tradition
is that very thing. There's no reason to imagine
it was ever static beyond people's lack of imagination and slightly
perverted wish-fulfilment. These things are like coral, it can grow
bold and tall, but the only living part of it at any point is the
top.
Yet I
find myself wanting to like this more than I actually do. For all I
say above it feels like it stays on the outside,
noses pressed against a window which never opens. They feel like folk
songs through a distorting glass, given warped reflection, rather
than next-generation folk songs, mutated into new life. Perhaps
significantly, I tended to like most the smaller number of
self-composed songs.
If the
folk influence on Earth is more buried, it's perhaps all the more
effective for all that. Putting Carlson's expansive guitar lines
inside song structures doesn't add to them, it corrals them, fences
in their borderlessness.
File
under 'interesting effort.' And remind me next time he's back in town
with Earth.
Two
tracks from London a few months ago, but pretty much the same set
minus the drummer. The first track with the voice-over rather than
vocals... I wish the whole set had gone more in that direction. If I
recall rightly, for some reason in Brighton he did that against a
recording.
LED
ZEPPELIN: CELEBRATION DAY
Okay,
a disclaimer! I didn't actually see Led Zeppelin live in the last few
weeks. This is the film of their one-off reunion gig performed back
in 2007, as a tribute to Atlantic records boss Ahmet Ertegun. But it
was a chance to see one of the finest bands of the Seventies, quite
possibly of all time, a band of whom I've been a huge fan since my
early teens. And that feeling seemed infectious in Brighton's Duke of
Yorks cinema, with people clapping and cheering after numbers and
generally behaving as much as possible as if we were really at a live
gig. (With that inevitable staple of gigs, a few choosing to behave
like total assholes, but never mind that now...)
The
reviews from the time... turns out, they were pretty much spot on.
Not only do the band still have it, they may even be better
live now than before – for they've finally cut those uber-long
guitar solos and twenty-minute drum workouts which drew so much punky
disdain. The result is a band who press the right buttons and then
just keep pressing them.
But
there's something more. When singer Robert Plant introduced a song
they've never played before, I briefly wondered if they'd written a
whole new track. In fact it was 'For Your Life'
from the album 'Presence.' Which was actually
their least well-receive album. (Wikipedia
notes without irony it was “the
slowest-selling studio album by the band... only managing to achieve
triple-platinum certification in the United States.” They never
toured it at the time (though they did perform subsequently). And
there's a sense of unfinished business here – for that album's
sound dominates the gig, even when they're playing tracks from other
times.
It's
truly great art when it can straddle apparent contradictions. The
classic Zeppelin fanzine was called 'Tight But Loose', (inevitably now a website,) which gives us a clue which particular
contradiction the band were able to overcome. While they could pound
out heavy riffs with the best of them, they were of course never
confined to that. Yet that masks a more important point. And even
when they were doing that they never sounded
regimented or plodding, the way it did with so many copycat bands.
Except
'Presence' pushed things towards that tight end
like they'd never been before. Any fan can tell you why it couldn't
be toured, Plant was laid up following a bad traffic accident. And
that sense of confinement, combined with problems booking studio
time, produced a strange mix of desperation and urgency which came to
characterise the album. At a time where there was a virtual
competition to stay in the studio as long as possible,
'Presence' was done in a mere eighteen days.
It
was leaner, punchier, less flamboyant than anything before. When I
first played it in my teenage bedroom I had the same confused
reaction as anyone else, and didn't listen to it again for months.
But I gradually came to understood it simply was doing what it
wanted rather than what I had come to expect. Nowadays, I think of it
as second only to 'Physical Graffiti.' (Ironically
it was succeeded by 'The Song Remains The Same',
the double-live album dedicated to the uber-long guitar solos and
drum workouts which 'Presence' cut against, the
only Zeppelin album I didn't keep hold of.)
It's
possible that the much-delayed performing of 'Presence'
has as much to do with the gig's new sound as changing popular
tastes. Certainly 'The Song Remains the Same',
from the band's most prog-friendly album 'Houses of the
Holy', is the nearest thing to a misfire in the gig.
(Though admittedly the version of 'No Quarter',
from the very same album, is superb.)
The
only downside of this domination of 'Presence's
sound is that, like the album itself, it cuts out the softer, more
acoustic side of the band. Early tours had a midsection where the
band would don barstools to get folky. The only comparable tracks
here alternate folky with rocky sections such as 'Ramble
On' and the inevitable 'Stairway to Heaven.'
Despite
all this adulation, I am happily agnostic over whether the band
reform again or not. Their final album, 'In Through The Out
Door' was already pushing in a post-Zeppelin direction, and
notably is the only album not be get visited in this gig. Drummer
John Bonham's death, however tragic and untimely, may well have just
accentuated the inevitable. Plus I saw Plant's new outfit, the Band
of Joy, at the Electric Proms last year, and thought them excellent.
Should they ever play again, I would certainly have no complaints.
Should they all be too busy with new business to look back at the old
days... well, we have our memories and this film.
Tracklist for the gig is here. (And yes that's right, they don't actually play 'Celebration Day'!)
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