Wind Resistance by Karine Polwart / Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh / 4.11.17

Play-gig-lecture muses on nature, belonging and loss with a haunting soundtrack

Folk singer Karine Polwart was one of the hits of the Edinburgh International Festival in 2016 with Wind Resistance, an unusual show that is part-gig, part-story, part-natural history lecture. She has released it on album and script and revived the show for a week long run in Edinburgh following a week in Dublin.

The stage was dressed like a comfortable musical study and Polwart was alone throughout, intertwining spoken word and song fragments in three loose strands: her own life on Fala Flow, a peat bog beside her home south of Edinburgh; the life and love of the grandparents of a local woman Polwart met at the end of her life, and a forensic examination of the bird and plant life of the bog.

Parallels between the three strands shifted pleasingly, moving woozily in and out of focus around themes of motherhood, sacrifice, loss and belonging. There was a gentle narrative propulsion that gave it, if not tension, then at least a tightening and easing of mood.

When performing her folk music Polwart is a confident, garrulous raconteur and that carried her a long way here. Her lack of ease with the stagier movements and gestures was more than made up for by her warm, funny and sincere delivery. A one woman show is a daunting prospect for someone whose day job is acting, but Wind Resistance succeeded through Polwart's poise. Stunning sound design that connected to the on-stage action in startling bursts of invention also helped.

Short musical pieces peppered the evening. Polwart has the most beautiful, pure, clear voice, so musical that it has no use for ornament or fuss. She launched into daring, vaulting fragments of melody then back directly into speech and the transformation was magical. Waiting for it to happen again carried more suspense than any of the stories.

The music created moments of punctuation within and between the strands of the show, using elements of modern and traditional folk. The shame is only that there wasn't more of it.

The stories demanded resolution, but they couldn't bear the structural strain of being the climax of an evening of theatre, the doomed romance of her neighbour's grandparents in particular feeling simple and sentimental.

Where the script shone was in its short, self-contained fragments such as the spellbinding evocation of the moor as a place of spiritual solace, or the football commentary that connected Alex Ferguson's footballing philosophy to the flying techniques of migrating geese.

Wind Resistance made its own space somewhere between theatre, lecture and gig. It was a funny, poignant and thoughtful examination of an ordinary place made special through focus, understanding and empathy. And the music was beautiful.

Redood Mountain / Glad Cafe Glasgow / 28.9.17

Folk-country with a Caledonian twist

​Following in the footsteps of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly is a brave move, but Redwood Mountain mine the same musical material for new gems. Writing new tunes for some of the songs collected by Alan Lomax on his mid-20th century travels through the rural south of the US, the duo is keeping some pretty rarified company: Lomax was the first to record Guthrie, Leadbelly, Muddy Waters and others, and gave Pete Seeger his first break.

But by seeking out songs with some kind of Scottish connection and pairing guitar with trad fiddle Redwood Mountain's Amy Geddes and Dean Owens do manage to shed some new light on the material.

Owens chatted merrily through some of the songs' backstories while Geddes punctured the bonhomie with cruelly funny withering asides.

​Some of the songs had a slight pastiche feeling, but others were rich and touching. The music felt most interesting where the Scottish influence was heaviest, where you felt new lines and connections were being drawn, uncovering the common roots of two very different strands of folk music. ​

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds / Hydro Glasgow / 27.9.17

A great front man is a dictator, and Nick Cave is one of the best there is.

With unhinged intensity he whispered and bellowed the first songs at the front three rows of a packed, though not quite full, Hydro in Glasgow as though playing an intimate club show.

Then a few songs in he stretched out those bony preacher fingers and tugged the air. Hundreds of people followed his gesture, moving towards to the stage as one, mesmerised and pressing close, coming into his manic sphere of influence.

With grimacing, straining, sweating commitment he held us rapt for two hours, willing every beautifully timed syllable out as though composing them on the spot. It was mesmerising, bewitching and slightly unreal.

Backing band The Bad Seeds sounded amazing, reined-in and taut, only exploding into noisesome chaos briefly and with devastating effect. Cave too, not the strongest singer on his records, sang with surprising richness.

The blistering, hypnotic energy of the first five songs dissipated and Cave spent too long basking in the crowd's adoration, held aloft on fans' shoulders or shepherding audience members on stage.

But along the way we got a fragile, broken Into My Arms, the crowd taking up the chorus with gentle, hymnal empathy, the air charged with sorrowful joy. The line 'I believe in love', a cliché in others' hands, became a defiant protestation of faith thrown out at the gathering darkness.

Red Right Hand was miraculously understated. It could so easily turn into an overblown carnival blast, but it was quiet, sinister, brooding, its skeezy, sleazy organ threateningly insinuating, the slick groove a lushly carpeted stairway to damnation.

The massive Hydro seemed an odd choice for someone like Cave, a determined indie oddball not given to lavish visuals or cynical profiteering. Not only did he do a better job of anyone I've ever seen of involving the whole hall through sheer force of personality, it became a bigger, more cathartic and more moving experience because twelve thousand people were there rather than twelve hundred. ​

The sound was beautiful, rich and dreamy but, annoyingly, came in part from backing tapes. But what marked this show out was not how it sounded but how it looked. This was the most stunningly lit show I've ever seen.o edit.

The Eskies & Eliza Carthy / Celtic Connections / O2 ABC Glasgow / 2.2.17

Headliner Eliza Carthy had the night stolen from under her nose by support band The Eskies as both bands wheeled out brassy, raucous, piratey tunes for the sparse crowd gathered below the ABC’s giant glitterball.

The new generation of folkies like Carthy’s newly-assembled band and the likes of Bellowhead have a decidedly seafaring feel to them, with jaunty horns and lolling, salty grooves.

Carthy’s big slick 12-piece band made a rich and glorious noise and the erotic, lazy-hipped swagger of Big Machine was sleazily brilliant. But frankly it got boring pretty quickly, the songs melding together in a bit of a samey mush. An expensive-sounding, reasonably entertaining one, but a mush all the same.

The Ekies did better, though they were hardly a model of variety. Like a rum-soaked Chas and Dave they bounced and bobbed through a good-natured set of harmony-rich romps.

They are deft players and canny arrangers. Even though the trumpet and trombone were inaudible they had rich resources at their disposal: guitars, mandolin, bass, drums and four strong voices.

The big, pristine sound of a modern venue stripped them of some of the swaggering grit of their records and I would love to see them in a small whisky-doused back room somewhere, hollering and sweating and hanging from the rafters.

It helps to have an incredibly charming, funny, cheeky front man taking reviewers to task about the absurd things we say and admitting that they were running out of material rather than time.
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This was their first Scottish trip - look out for their next.

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CW Stoneking is part comic-throwback, part-Tom Waits carnival barking tribute, part moving crooning troubadour. His show was wry, entertaining and had moments of mellifluous, enveloping beauty. 

He dresses as if on a plantation and both he and the band play what look like 1930s period instruments. At times the concerted efforts to create an old-timey feel bring the show dangerously close to novelty act territory but there were enough moments of rhythmic swagger and harmonic invention to prove that Stoneking has more to offer musically than pastiche. 

For a show dedicated to the music of times of intense political struggles, particularly on issues of race, there was a bit too much talk of 'the jungle' and too many tracks that relied on a tom-tom parody of African music from old Hollywood films for my liking. Maybe I was being over-sensitive. 
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There was beautiful music here - Handyman, On A Desert Isle and Jungle Paradise shone. But there were too many unresolved questions rattling around my head about Stoneking's careless use of imagery, stories and sounds of a troubled recent history seemingly without appreciating the resonance of them, for me to comfortably enjoy the music in isolation.

While the world copies Beyonce who's copying Whitney who’s copying Aretha, the annoyingly named but sublimely gifted ALA.NI has breathed soulful new life into an unfashionable style of singing: artful, controlled and ludicrously expressive.

Sweaty, sleazy soul is a wonderful thing. Listen to Aretha Franklin's breakthrough work with the oily funk of the Muscle Shoals Band and I defy you not to squirm in your office chair with bodily delight. It's hot, it's scratchily humid, it's a sonic miracle.

But so many  bad copies have been made that the originals are at risk. So ALA.NI has stepped away from her career slinging harmonies for Mary J Blige and Blur and has revived an untrendy, stagey sound. She's the reincarnation of Deitrich, Day and Hepburn and it's sublime.

When she sings, every consonant is perfectly placed, an arch syncopation dotting the most everyday phrases. ALA.NI is capable of enunciating like a New England ice queen while stroking a note like Ella Fitzgerald. Her tales of loving manipulation and earnest cheating drip with rich contempt and aching defiance but the delivery is old-fashioned, controlled and haughty.

For a long time probably the least cool thing in entertainment has been to admit that you've been to stage school. Singing like you're in a musical is a no-no even if you're actually in one.

ALA.NI went to stage school and sings like she's the star of a 1950s revue. She preens over her notes, taking ostentatious time and care to get each one exactly right. There is no pretence here that this is unschooled emotion straight from the soul. She is giving a performance and giving in completely to the artifice, the fakery and the controlled theatricality of her craft.

ALA.NI's recorded music is pretty but samey. In a large arena or a stadium it might melt into a profitable sonic blancmange of Adele proportions. But in an embarrassingly poorly attended gig (I go to better-attended office meetings several times a week: she charmingly invites everyone to introduce themselves a couple of songs in. 'Hi, I'm Tom') with just a guitar for accompaniment it becomes magical. To be so close to someone who make such perfect sound is an almost-religious experience. Her large frame extends out beyond the stage, seemingly to touch us all. Her controlling confidence urges surrender to her charming sonic whims. Her every perfectly-annunciated, archly-crafted note marks her out as a master of the manipulation and uplifting delusion needed to carry an audience of strangers into your most intimate musings.

This is alchemy: the taking of slightly-samey retro folk and the conversion of it into something close to a cult. On another night in a bigger venue with rain dripping outside and a babysitter to rush home to maybe it would have been just good. In a near-empty King Tut's one Glasgow summer evening it was somewhere close to perfect.

http://www.ala.ni/ 

This review was published in The Daily Telegraph, 6 June 2016 

​Neil Young is still campaigning, still railing with passion if not precision at corporate threats to everything from farming to energy supplies to the quality of our audio files. But do the indulged passions of a 70 year old rock star make for a compelling show?

Thousands in Glasgow's Hydro thought so and paid devoted, roaring respect to a hero. Nonetheless, early signs were not good.

This tour promotes a protest album about agribusiness behemoth Monsanto which also carries a dig at Starbucks for good measure. As his young band joined him after a solo start, two figures in farming hats and denims walked across the stage spreading seeds while the big screen showed a picture of a daisy. A few songs later sinister figures in gleaming biohazard suits sprayed the ground in a decidedly evil manner. It was not subtle stuff.

Other indulgences were on display. Songs grew longer the later in the set they appeared. A fuzzy intro and a brief snatch of singing was typically followed by five minutes or more of leg-splayed posing and stomping to the squealing guitar wanderings of Young and his two guitarists, sons of his friend Willie Nelson.

Young has long been a noise merchant but the lack of fretboard discipline would shame a prog rocker or metal hero. Songs lasted ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes. Young has a distinctive soloing style and sound - it can be jagged, attack-filled and thrilling. But it can also be languid and meandering, and excitement fades as the minutes drift by.

As a celebration of the hypnotic power of repetitive, throbbing noise, Young's approach sometimes worked. The bone-shaking cadence of Love And Only Love - whose final winding-up was longer than most pop songs - felt like the grave pealing of distorted, doom-laden bells. The solemn repetition of single heavy notes was artful and moving, but the guitar histrionics produced too few of these moments.

A different Young had opened the concert. Alone behind piano or guitar he rattled through earlier, folkier hits like After The Gold Rush and Heart Of Gold. His voice had lost much of its power but had gained a wispy mournfulness. It was a moving contrast to the strident young man of the recordings, but the performances here felt rushed, something to get through to reach the noisy indulgence of the following two hours.