Soledad Brothers, David Viner@ The Gaelic Club, 13/06/04

Wed 16th Jun, 2004 in Gig Reviews

There’s nothin’ wrong with the blues. In its varied permutations, the blues can rock you, shock you, and bring you to tears. It can be a soundtrack to late nights, early mornings, alcohol binges, cocaine overdoses and heartbreak. It can be happy, sad, or a lil’ somethin’ in between. We’re talking about a genre with a canon as impressive as Alan Lomax’s field recordings of blues singers, Robert Johnson’s plaintive yearnings, the Rolling Stones’ bluesy rock, Nick Drake’s much-bootlegged home demo blues songs, and so much more that if I tried to get even vaguely comprehensive I’d have scores of blues-nerds writing in to me, weeping at their keyboards.

Nowadays, the mainstream proponents of the blues tend to be white, middle-class kids from Detroit (the White Stripes) or Ohio (the Black Keys). Nouveau blues tends to be raw and dirty, like a cowboy boot stompin’ on a gravel road. The Soledad Brothers are from the Detroit camp, the same (largely media-constructed) scene that produced Jack & Meg White and the Von Bondies. The Soledad Brothers come to Australia with little fanfare bar from those ‘in-the-know’ (studded-belt wearing hipsters mainly).

David Viner was up next, performing a beautiful array of blues numbers with an earnestness and sweet modesty that attracted those in the crowd paying attention. His subtle fretwork was backed by the beating of his shoes on the stage floor, delivering an awesome accompaniment to his charming voice. He’s an outrageously likeable young man with an obvious love laidback, folky blues.  Tracks like Nobody’s Business What I Do are impossible not to like – tinged with a certain familiarity and yet totally new. For mine, Viner was the highlight of the evening.

The Soledad Brothers were undoubtedly good. Drummer Ben Swank kept the beat going and looked like a crazy-man whilst doing it. Guitarist/vocalist Johnny Walker, looking like Albert Hammond Jnr. on a bad hair day, laid down some raw, rhythmic tunes on his axe. And Oliver Henry’s guitar and saxophone work was lovely. A song like Teenage Heart Attack is rock ‘n’ roll par excellence.

There was, however, something missing. Whereas Viner’s lack of volume allowed the audience to hear the soul in his voice, the nigh-bombastic clatter of the Soledad Brother’s meant the audience rarely got a glimpse of their heart. The fact that it took them about forty-five minutes to even say ‘hello’ to the audience didn’t help either. When a band doesn’t engage with its audience, the audience tends to get alienated fairly quickly. And for the most part, the punters weren’t blown away by the Soledad Brothers, presumably because they were yearning for the band to acknowledge their presence.

The Soledad Brothers could’ve quite easily blown the audience away in a symphony of sweaty, dirty rock, but in the end they seemed content with just delivering their quite-good music in a totally paint-by-numbers way. A shame, really.