If you’ve heard GINA VILLALOBOS' album ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Pony’ you will no doubt have delighted in the rough-edged country influenced rock that makes up the majority of it’s content.
Ms. V has a sandpaper rough vocal style that can be both exuberantly raunchy and achingly world-weary depending on each song’s requirements. On said album it is helped along to great effect by having the full force of a band behind it.
Tonight however its just Gina and her guitarist, Ben Pringle, stripping the songs to their bare essentials with a noticeably different end result. Songs are slowed down slightly and allowed an opportunity to really reveal their emotional hearts. On occasions this doesn’t quite work, some songs missing the exuberance evident on the album and losing something of their uplifting quality. A prime example would be ‘Can’t Come Down’, unable to quite capture it’s recorded determination and ‘won’t be beat’ attitude.
However, on some the effect is stunning, Gina and Ben swaying, digging the air with their guitars, creating intense and captivating renditions. The highlight would have to be ‘California’ that realises itself as a soulfully blue paean to “wide highways in heaven” – totally mesmerising.
LAURA VEIRS, from Seattle USA, produced a set that took me totally unawares. Having only heard her most recent album ‘Carbon Glacier’ I was expecting a coldly quirky performance of songs that have that mixed effect of being able to draw you in while making you feel slightly queasy and uncomfortable.
But, this was not to be the case. Within two or three songs we’d heard about “devil’s hootenannies”, “whiskey parlours” and of being “drunk as a skunk”, all presented with a backing of acoustic and electric guitar (Ms. Veirs & Karl Blau respectively), and trombone (Steve Moore - alternating with a tiny, held on the knee keyboard). The trombone works particularly well, either jazzily mournful or, greasily slipping and sliding through the songs.
|
The lady herself is shyly warm and engaging, looking like the archetypal high-school ‘dweeb’. The set feeds off her three albums to date and her music, for the most part, has a traditionally folksy/country element but with a distinctly off-kilter approach that gives it an ‘outsider’ quality calling to mind the likes of The Meat Puppets (perhaps backing the vocal frailty of Moe Tucker?).
However, when all three protagonists disappear from view to manipulate various foot switches and effects pedals to create a maelstrom of noise and distortion – alt.country’s very own Sonic Youth? – you realise that these Seattleans probably had misspent youths submerged in the music of their hometown label Sub-Pop, listening to the likes of Tad, Mudhoney and of course, Nirvana. (In fact, the second song of a much-deserved encore includes the lines, “the fate of Kurt Cobain, drugs coursing through his veins …….. a love of music, colour and words, is it a blessing or a curse?”).
All in all it’s wonderful stuff with endearing moments of gentle playfulness. One song, ‘Spelunking’ (for obvious reasons – if you don’t know, look it up), is played in virtual darkness, illuminated only by small head-mounted lights – and the luminescent eyes of the giraffe (?) painted on Telford’s backdrop - and you can’t help wondering if this is a mischievous nod in the direction of another Seattle artist, author Tom Robbins, whose book ‘Skinny Legs And All’ contains a section that suggests a very different meaning for the verb “spelunking” than any you’re likely to find in a dictionary!
|
