You should never meet legends. Dylan Carlson, a man whose name will be forever linked with roomie Kurt Cobain, is shorter than I expected, and his voice is higher. If his musical output was anything short of seminal, I might have been filled with disappointment and ended up writing a piece about not meeting legends and regrest and that sort of rubbish, but it isn’t so I won’t.
There seems to be a trend (ie two bands I’ve seen) amongst American bands of featuring support acts comprising offshoots of the main event. Tonight, Stebmo, a two-man act featuring Earth keyboard player Steve Moore and bassist Dan McGreevy on drums, are here to warm up the crowd. Steve has a beard you could lose a tribe in and looks like a bible belt preacher, but is warm and modest, matching the melloow vibes of his low-fi stack of synths. Jazz is the order of the day and both are profficient jazz musicians, playing a mix of numbers from the likes of John Coltrane (“against my therapist’s advice” says Steve) and their own part improvised repetoire. Surprisingly low key as opposed to low frequency but pleasant enough.
For anyone in the audience expecting the sludge drone of early Earth, tonight’s set list might be a bit of a let down. For the rest of us who have heard ‘And The Bees Make Honey…” it is a revelation. From the opening ‘Carrion Crow’, notes are not so much played at etched into the air and impressed upon your ear drums – such is the force of this slow unfolding of melody tonight. Dylan grows about a foot on stage, face impassive as stone, bent over his guitar and utterly transfixed, but it is Adrienne Davies, drummer and Dylan’s better half, who is utterly engrossing; every beat is played with the force and intensity of regularly-paced music but with organic slowness, arms raising a falling like the shifting of tree boughs in storm. In fact, the audience is caught in the same storm, swaying as the waves of sound crash around us with eschatonic finality. Camera phones flash on all sides; Dylan flinches and confesses he has a medical condition which is affected by flashing lights, a condition caused by excess of ‘eels and mash’ before crashing into ‘Engine of Ruin’. The evening ends with a new song, “so new it doesn’t have a name,” that Dylan drily observes will probably be named by competition. Rough but undoubtedly epic it brings the set shuddering to a close. A legendary night whose only anti-climax is that the world did not end in the final bar.
Popularity: 5% [?]
