Micah P Hinson @ the GaelicClub, Sydney (02/07/11)

Mon 11th Jul, 2011 in Gig Reviews

Politics and music are natural bedfellows. Music can be a potent vehicle for passionate social opinion and the last 40 years of American politics have seen musicians flock to both sides, directly and indirectly offering their expressions of support or defiance. Some, like Micah P Hinson, choose to exist in a sort of ven diagram, with small gray areas in which music and ideology swim together, but are largely mutually exclusive, strong enough to exist independently. Hinson is a Texas born Republican with strong conservative Anglo-Christian roots. For many people this loaded biography contains enough psychological mortar to build pretty strong fortifications against almost anything he might have to say before he even says it, and that’s a shame, because there’s real craft behind his music. His wonderfully wounded hangdog voice deserves an open mind and warm consideration unsullied by ill informed preconceptions. His show at the Gaelic was an incredibly touching exercise in patience and grace, made all the more remarkable for the occasionally polemic rhetoric behind it.

One thing that is immediately striking is the authenticity of the performance. Hinson’s background of drugs, destitution and eventually prison time is worthy fodder for any well travelled country singer, but it could also just as easily been the basis for an over-serious hour of self serving melodrama. Instead it became a wonderful scene of choreographed, detailed catharsis that gently invited the crowd to go with it rather than dragging us uncomfortably through the murky subtext of his narratives. His albums consist of a range of tones that dabble in orchestration and strings through to straight up country folk songs, but tonight it was a stripped back selection that tied together his body of work nicely for uninitiated (leaving behind the politics) and allowed fans access to a less divisive personality than is clearly present on paper.

His guitar sounded beautiful, and though it sounded lonely, it was a confident loneliness, like it was used to bearing its heavy burden of emotion and dusty footed philosophies. His voice is a bastardization of Tom Waits and perhaps Willie Nelson, and his colourful past aptly recalls the occasional misadventures of both of these gentlemen. A deep Texan drawl bends and curls around narratives of love found and lost, his beloved America and it’s apparent misuse (he’s in staunch opposition to the Obama administration), of bad choices and worse consequences. You can’t talk about such weighty subjects without a modest sense of humour or you run the risk of being too serious (unless you can do it as elegantly as someone like Nick Cave), and Hinson has a self depreciating streak that runs through his act.

The generous set explored several of his albums and didn’t overplay itself. He was chatty and amicable, although perhaps a bit shy, and you get the sense that the act of performance is as therapeutic for him as it was entertaining for us. His spindly, hunting-vest-clad form jerked and swayed in a strange way that didn’t match the grace of his music, and he clutched his guitar in front of him like a buoy in a harbor. It was hard to comprehend how someone so bookish and awkward could possibly have produced such a rich timbre, but the contradiction only added to the appeal. It was a fascinating and memorable show from a charismatic and incredibly idiosyncratic performer, and I look forward to his next one.