by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I stayed up until 1 a.m. to watch an Austin
City Limits episode featuring modern-day
blues singer-guitarist Gary Clark, Jr. (whom I’ve previously watched on the
show billed with the great new band Alabama Shakes — PBS ran that one just
after the documentary on Sister Rosetta Tharpe and damned if Alabama Shakes’
lead singer, guitarist and songwriter, Brittany Howard, didn’t come off as a
virtual reincarnation of Rosetta Tharpe and the logical person to play her if
someone makes a biopic!). Last time I thought Clark sounded like Jimi Hendrix
as a guitarist — or at least like Hendrix lite (he seems to have picked up
Jimi’s bizarre project of turning an inherently staccato instrument like the
guitar into a legato one) — but was considerably more lyrical and pleasant as a
singer. This time around I wasn’t quite so impressed; Clark is still a dynamite
guitarist but his songs seemed less interesting and I got very tired with the falsetto he was using on most of
them, which only made him sound thin and weak. He’s got four horn players and
three backup singers, all of whom
drowned him out at times, and the Black woman in the middle of the three backup
singers seems to have a stronger and more powerful voice than he does! What’s
more, the songs were pretty standard
I’m-in-love-with-a-girl-and-she’s-in-love-with-someone-else stuff — even a song
called “Church” (Clark only announced the last two of his five songs and so I
had to guess at the titles of the other three) turned out to be yet more dreary
mopiness about romantic frustration. Things perked up with his last song, “The
Healing,” from a CD he’d just put out when he did this program (2015) in which
he created an artistic alter ego,
“Sonny Boy Slim” (he said these were nicknames he got as a boy, the first from
his mother and the second from friends, though I’d always assumed he got them
from Sonny Boy Williamson and Sunnyland Slim!), and pretended to be a newly
rediscovered old-line blues musician. I bought that CD but wasn’t all that impressed with it, though this time around it seemed
like the “Slim” material brought a fire and a sense of commitment to him his
songs as “Gary Clark, Jr.” hadn’t. The second half of this Austin
City Limits featured an intriguing
Australian rock singer-songwriter named Courtney Barnett, whom I quite liked
even though her act seemed awfully derivative — she sounds like a cross between
Chrissie Hynde and a female version of Lou Reed (and the way she makes her
sounds out of fragments of urban scenes and tells her stories in a
dispassionate, almost journalistic manner also shows Reed’s influence), and she
even wears her hair like Hynde did in the early days of The Pretenders. She
leads a trio — just herself on voice and guitar, Bones Sloane on bass guitar
and Dave Madie on drums — just the basics, and she has them all dress in black
T-shirts and black jeans. She dresses that way herself, and the only way you can
tell her apart from her two male bandmates is she’s the one with breasts and no
facial hair. I liked her, though I’d have liked her even better if she’d sung
with more of Hynde’s passion and power instead of lapsing into a Reedian
monotone on all too many of the songs; still, she’s basically strong enough as
singer, guitarist and songwriter
to have a shot at stardom.
I might have been more impressed by the acts on Austin
City Limits last night if I hadn’t watched
the local version, Live at the Belly Up, the night before and seen a band that totally blew me away: The Tilt,
a local group (based in Pacific Beach) built around its two lead members,
singer Jesse Malley (a woman, even though she uses what’s normally the male
spelling of her first name) and guitarist Jeff Irwin. The Tilt opened with “Oil
Man,” an incredible song that featured just Malley on vocals — like at least a
couple of other singers I’ve heard recently, Idina Menzel and Maren Morris, she
sounds astonishingly like Janis Joplin, not just the timbral quality of her
voice but the raw emotion Janis so legendarily projected — and Irwin on slide
guitar. He didn’t play slide on the other six songs The Tilt played but he’s a
strong player anyway — Malley and Irwin hooked up musically through a Craigslist
ad she put up asking for “a blues-rock guitarist that can shred,” and she found
one. The other two members of the band, bass guitarist John Urban and drummer
Abel Vallejo, joined on the remaining six songs, “South,” “Going ’Round,”
“Vulture Mind,” “Pandemonium,” “The Flood” and “Goin’ Down,” and The Tilt
proved to be an excellent hard-rock band with blues underpinnings even though
Malley towers over her bandmates as much as Janis did with the other members of
her first band, Big Brother and
the Holding Company. The Tilt’s Live at the Belly Up appearance was taped November 5, 2012 (though the
copyright date on the show is 2013) and the second half of the program featured
a fairly large group called Dead Feather Moon, whom I probably would have liked
better if they hadn’t had to follow The Tilt. They seem to be working the same
vein of Native American rock as Grant Lee Phillips (whose mid-1990’s album Mighty
Joe Moon, under the band name Grant Lee
Buffalo, is one of the unsung masterpieces of the era), but lead singer Justen
Berge has a rather whiny falsetto voice that’s hardly in the same league as
Phillips’ and their songs tended to sound all too similar.
