Gig review: 'Like taking a wholesome walk through the forests of the world' - Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit

Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit
Hackney Empire, 10th October

This review originally appeared on More Than The Music

Johnny Flynn has recently taken a hiatus from music, instead gracing the stage at Shakespeare’s Globe and the West End to act in Richard III, Twelfth Night and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. Now the tousled English folkster has returned to the folk scene in which he cuts such an inimitable figure. This current tour, promoting his new album Country Mile, proves that he has not lost his touch.

Flynn’s voice appears effortless, slipping the notes into each phrase like delicate fingers into a perfectly fitting glove. He is as pitch-perfect live as he is on recordings, and brings an additional frisson to his performance with his unforced authenticity and the occasional well-placed extra glissando. The Sussex Wit (made up of Flynn’s sister Lillie on vocals, flute and melodian, David Beauchamp on drums, Adam Beach on bass, Joe Zeitlin on cello and newest member Cosmo Sheldrake on keyboard) complement Flynn beautifully. The band sit separately on a sparse stage, silhouetted by backlighting; a beguiling set-up that belies the perfect synchrony of their performance as a seamless whole. Lillie’s voice adds an ethereal aura to her brother’s earthy tones, which together mingle with miscellaneous folk instruments to create a sound that maintains its integrity as much at Hackney Empire as it did at their intimate Rough Trade record store gig two weeks ago.

The set was compiled from a satisfying mix of old favourites and new songs. Many of the new ones do sound remarkably similar to those from his previous two albums, A Larum and Been Listening – Flynn’s sound has definitely not been revolutionised, lending a certain sameyness to the gig. But if you like intriguing, imaginative folk then that’s no bad thing. From the heart-warming Einstein’s Idea (written when his son was born – cue every woman in the crowd melting) and the two-part contrapuntal harmony of After Eliot, to the vigorous trumpet-enhanced folk-rock of Howl and the rollicking Tickle Me Pink, there is plenty of diversity within Flynn’s oeuvre to keep you wanting more.

Flynn’s music always instills a certain emotional heft, with his catchy hooks and ambiguous, poetic lyrics. Seeing him live, you feel this even more keenly – there is a lack of pretension in these songs that makes you want to slow down your pace of life, pick up a banjo and strum your heart out. Watching a Johnny Flynn and the Sussex Wit gig is like going for a wholesome walk through the forests of the world, taking in everything from acorn to oak and emerging covered in mud with ruddy cheeks, much like Flynn’s own, and gratifyingly invigorated by your nourishing musical experience.

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds

Album review: in praise of Laura Marling's Once I Was An Eagle

Laura Marling, Once I Was An Eagle

Released 27 May 2013, Virgin

Experiencing Once I Was An Eagle is less like listening to an album and more like walking before an epic tableaux, tracing its narrative and absorbing yourself in its intricate threads. The tracks are not individuated, autonomous entities but run into each other in an inexorable story that the teller is fated to tell and the listener is compelled to hear. From the wilderness of the lurking beast and the eagle and dove's eternal fight, through the fierce cry of the master hunter, to the gentle damsel by the shore and the hoped for contentment of a happy ending, the album tells its epic with heartfelt truthfulness and musical virtuosity.

Marling’s vocal control is phenomenal. Her vibrato on the title track ‘Once I Was An Eagle’ undulates like lush hills, trailing off into a valley of silence with the held note of the violin running through it like a stream, while each perfect vocal glissando of her chorus is a trickle of water spilling over the rocks into little pools of exquisite sound. And the themes of her album are similarly metaphorised in the beauty of the natural landscape and the elusive complexity of the humans who inhabit it. With every meticulous nuance of her voice she captures this complexity, expressing overwhelming power, consuming compassion and every emotion in between.

The music itself is a genre-defying mixture of country, folk, bluegrass, classical guitar that borders on flamenco and Fantasia-esque film music. She employs unusual tunings and instruments including organs, lap steels and pipes to enhance her skilful guitar riffs. Those riffs become motifs that transmute and tie together the threads of the life she weaves, perfectly marrying with the progress of the narrative. In ‘When Were You Happy? (And How Long Has That Been)’ she sings ‘The more I think the harder I breathe’ – that may be true, but the unique sounds and ingeniously expressed thoughts of this album are a breath of fresh air for the listener.

Marling dazzled with her entrance onto the music scene at the age of 18 with the delicate debut album Alas I Cannot Swim (2008). She has since turned that precocious youth into a self-possessed maturity, accepting that it is impossible to ‘know what it is you don’t know’. Her most recent album, A Creature I Don’t Know (2011), is full of her characteristic innovation and ingenuity but the power of her emotional, musical and lyrical hooks was slightly lost in complex obscurity. Now, she has combined the lot to produce a unique musical perspective on the world that is at once virtuosic and eminently accessible.

Marling has always had great literary sensibilities – her prevalent bird metaphors allude to Shelley’s skylark whose ‘sweetest songs sing of saddest thought’. But for Marling, birdsong is a reminder of the transience and pain of life not because the birds are unaware of this but because the birds, as in ‘Love Be Brave’, ‘suffer so; do they sing because they know this life don’t go slow?’ Marling’s music does something similar – it doesn’t shy away from the pain of life but makes it into something beautiful. It is a music in which you can dissolve yourself, fade far away and quite forget the world around you while sharing Marling’s ‘pleasure pain’ as if it is, exquisitely, your own.

Follow me on twitter @BetweenTheReeds

Finally in the headlights: Frightened Rabbit's Pedestrian Verse tour

Frightened Rabbit at The Forum, London
Wednesday 13 February, touring the UK until 28 February

Tall white posts, each crossed by three horizontal slats, flank the spartanly spiritual stage. They act as artful metaphors for Frightened Rabbit’s music. When singer Scott Hutchinson puts such raw passion into lyrics like ‘Well I can dip my head in the river/ Cleanse my soul, oh/ I'd still have the stomach of a sinner’ in ‘Holy’, they become mutated Christian crosses, embodying the tension between doubt and faith that runs throughout the new album. And with the panegyric ‘Old Old Fashioned’, on which Hutchinson croons ‘There's a radio in the corner/ It's dying to make a scene/ So give me that soft soft static/ With a human voice underneath’, the posts transform into pylons beautifully transmitting the band’s music, celebrating its amplified energy and its simultaneous old fashioned-ness, its allegiance to their traditional Scottish roots. Frightened Rabbit embody Celtic indie rock at its best, slowly building into anthemic guitar riffs layered with hauntingly honest lyrics.

It is these lyrics that really make Frightened Rabbit a heart-in-mouth kind of band. Hutchinson (also the songwriter) articulates himself through unusual, symbolic, breathtakingly frank depictions of loneliness and anguish. Occasionally some of this intensity is lost in the live performance – surprisingly for a nominally indie rock gig, it was the acoustic songs that had the rawest power. Every word of pain was agonisingly audible. The intricate finger-picking of ‘Poke’, with Hutchinson’s resonant voice intoning wistful ‘oohs’ between verses of exquisite desolation, made me cry (without any poking at my iris…)

But the coarser full-band songs had their own potency, despite a few moments when enthusiastic guitar riffs overwhelmed the finer complexities of lyrical beauty. This was a forceful, crisp and lucid gig, truly worthy of a band now deservedly selling out venues off the back of their first release on a major label with their fourth album, Pedestrian Verse. Tracks from this record were vigorous and robust, but I still think the visceral ache of their second, The Midnight Organ Fight, remains Frightened Rabbit’s best work. It clinches the longed-for condition of an indie rock band – that blurry curtain-opening moment of emotional nakedness when all the horrors of the drunken night before hit you square in the stomach, combined with the ability to face that moment with a musical dignity that makes it all worthwhile.

There was, perhaps inevitably, some of that simple, instinctive emotion missing from the live show. Pedestrian Verse as an album has more of a balance between the brutally personal and the universally contemplative – similarly, the band seem to have a more detached live presence than when I saw them at 2000 Trees festival two years ago. But with that detachment comes musical tightness and an overall coherent eloquence to the set. There is nothing humdrum or prosaic about Frightened Rabbit’s foray into the ‘pedestrian’. Quite the contrary: they have a sinewy power and subtle originality that is thoroughly deserving of the new disciples they will acquire from this landmark tour. The very fact that they deal in ‘not heroic acts of man’ is what paradoxically makes them great – not heroic perhaps, but better for that: discerning, elemental and refreshingly emotionally honest.

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds

The final tour? The beauty of Bon Iver

Bon Iver, 5th November, Berlin Arena

We stand in a cavernous hangar, lit only in the gaping rafters. The blank acoustic space slowly amasses sound-absorbent bodies, its atmosphere increasingly electric with the anticipation of seeing one of the best bands of our generation.

I kept looking longingly at the beams above our heads, presenting the impossible temptation to perch monkey-like above the hordes and receive the full impact of the sound. But even without this height, subsumed instead within the pulsing crowd, the liquid beauty of Bon Iver’s music seeps into your (very sweaty) skin.

Opening with the soft electric guitar riffs of Perth, the virtuosity of the whole band was showcased from start to finish. Every member of this behemoth group is humblingly multi-talented. Special mention for drummer/singer/one-man-band Sean Carey, whose soaring falsetto is one of the most exultant vocals I have ever heard (and that while he is drumming in perfect unison with Bon Iver’s other percussionist Matthew McCaughan). The set grew through other tracks from the band’s second album, Bon Iver, swelling into the ecstatic nostalgia of Towers and the emotive 80s homage Beth/Rest.

As always with the ‘famous’ single, there is a risk of disappointment, but For Emma, Forever Ago’s Skinny Love evolved seamlessly from initial understated delicacy to climactic, heart-thumping power. The pared-back acoustic recording is replaced in the live set with a throbbing leviathan of a song, from the first unadorned chords to the punctuating bass drums in the chorus which compel you to stamp your feet in time. And this is how I would characterise the whole gig – a perfect balance of fragile beauty and stomping euphoria.

From their heartfelt folky roots to their experimental impressionism, Bon Iver get it all right. Justin Vernon’s elemental, resonant bass and sinewy upper register perfectly complement a band whose tonal subtleties arise out of skilful layering, a respectful fusion of synths and acoustic sounds, and a genuine emotion that pervades every note – the instruments and their players metamorphose into one ecstatic sphere of sound.

All of which brings me to lament the fact that Bon Iver are having some down-time after this tour. Justin Vernon has said ‘I need to walk away from it while I still care about it. And then if I come back to it – if at all – I'll feel better about it and be renewed or something to do that’. So, if you haven’t yet, listen to Bon Iver and revel in their exquisite musical beauty. And hope that their renewal comes quickly to grace the stage again. In the meantime, this is a good place to start.

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds