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Victorian splendour. Bordello chandeliers. Neat
plastering. Trebley acoustics. Living room ambience.
These and many other design features of Bush Hall are
not the kind of things that should feature in the
header of any live review.
Except when the designers outplay the perfomer. If
Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen had been in town to check out
the decor, no pressure need be placed on his
unguessed-at capacity for music critique.
Already booked into larger venues to roadshow his
actually pretty brill Dreamt For Light Years In The
Belly Of A Mountain album, Bush Hall was an
opportunity to gape at head-horse Mark Linkous up
close.
Alas, the whites of his eyes remained a mystery, as
the main-man (geddit?) relied on Dave Stewart's
shades (and look) to screen-out the adoring reaction
from his beer-fed fans. Though the intimate gig
promised much, sweet dreams were, unfortunately, not
made of this.
Though its by no means the stuff of nightmares,
this Sparklehorse four-piece - augmented later by a
steel-guitarist - run through quality-controlled
blasts from the past and rockets from the here and now
as though zombie-animated by a witch-vetenarian.
An artist of not inestimable facility with mood and
tone, Linkous leads his band as though impatient all
the messy business of tour and promotion.
Headbangers like Ghost In The Sky and It's Not So
Hard are rendered free of any decorative aggregate,
assuming the lumpen consistency of reinforced
concrete. With the addition of steel-guitar, a misty
Morning Hollow almost transcends the air of journeyman
detachment, but as Linkous seems intent on driving the
whole band home as soon as feasibly possible, much
subtlety is cast into the aether.
Bulldozing his way through the set-list, the artist
known as Sparklehorse is not quite as we know him.
Though visibly no slouch with a gee-tar, Sparklehorse
recordings are the careful work of a man determined to
to set down a personally representative sound. In the
context of a live performance, such control is
tricky.
'Neath those defensive shades, its easy to believe
that Linkous is dreaming of the magic he can pull out
of the retro mixing desk he left back home.
Therefore slow burners like Gold Days and Apple Bed
are wearied and ramshackle, lacking the painstaking
colouring of the album blueprints.
Weird Sisters aims for a Sigur Rós-style
epiphany. But Bush Hall's no smoking signs discourage
the idea of any Zippo-in-the-air moments, but the
crowd-response had become so muted by this point, that
the local fire service were no doubt thinking of
clocking off early,
As Mark Linkous led his five-piece band through
Someday I Will Treat You Good, one was left to
conclude that the time had come to truly deliver on
the crackle-voiced promise. And as said tune arrived
near the end of this particular show, it remained as
promise only.
And 'ang on a minute, was that a fleur-de-lys on
that wall? Nice touch, Bush Hall. Llewelyn-Bowen would
be chuffed.
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