LondonNet Gig Review
Entrance
Born
Heller
12 Bar Club
28.02.05
Marauding bluesman
Baltimore's Guy Blakeslee not only passes the blues authenticity
test, he sets it on fire...
A lithe, stumbling man, whose raven beard and tangled nest of hair
nearly obscured his entire face, Guy Blakeslee (aka Entrance) took
stage and immediately rattled off a litany of psychedelic drugs
he had taken recently after announcing he'd been up for four days.
I checked for the nearest high ground lest I began to drown in his
lysergic stew.
Having captivated the audience with the sheer enormity of his drug
consumption, Blakeslee thankfully launched into a stomping, smoking
slab of primal freak-out blues, keeping time by ramming his heel
into the stage floor, the loop of bells around his ankle producing
a formidable jangle with each step. His insistence on making things
as loud as possible in the claustrophobic space of the 12 Bar, as
well as his random feral shrieks, was a welcome speed injection
after the lulling Born Heller. The crowd, curiously, started to
thin out almost immediately after he began playing, but I guess
Entrance's untamed one-man circus of schizoid blues-stomp would
have been jarring after the hefty dose of narcotics provided by
the openers.
After loping through the lovely "Darling", a derelict
train-car hobo lament with a structure of verse after verse and
ending with the titular invocation, he asked for requests. Someone,
naturally, requested Vashti Bunyan, after which came the inevitable
"play a Devendra song!" invoking his doppelganger (and
friend and one-time touring mate) Banhart. Entrance opted for ending
with the truly frightening and devastatingly beautiful "Mirror
/ Mantra", the last few minutes of which saw him gyrating on
the floor as though in his death throes (which, considering the
amount of drugs he purportedly ingested, was a genuine concern),
succumbing to the sonic prowess of his guitar as he gunned it to
its last vapours of gasoline.
In the proliferating neo-folk movement, the line between authenticity
and contrivance is growing ever more blurred as would-be Appalachian
bards sprout beards, drop a hundred bucks on Harry Smith's Smithsonian
anthology, and pick up guitars. It doesn't help that hordes of cloying
critics still insist on treating each new release that falls vaguely
under the folk umbrella with words like "spectral", "haunting",
and "backwoods". These commodities, though, do not a genuine
folk eccentric make, as demonstrated by Chicago-based duo Born Heller.
Yeah, so they both grew up next to mountain ranges, which they play
up to the hilt: neat. That doesn't mitigate the fact that Josephine
Baker's warble sounds less like the endearingly off-kilter, wounded
howl of Karen Dalton or the dewy wisteria of Brit songstress Vashti
Bunyan - both commonly cited influences among neo-folk darlings
Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom - and more like the chaste, wavering
voice of a singing nun on public television.
"This is our first time in London," Jason Ajemian said,
speaking in a barely discernible murmur, before talking about the
Nascar-obsessed hillbillies from his hometown. The American myth
does not, in fact, deepen. The highlights of their set were in the
Harry Smith covers, but unlike Entrance, who pillages and twists
the blues canon while still managing to remain reverent, Born Heller
seem to merely regurgitate yarns of yore - a sort of formaldehyde-preserved
retrospection that's inherently inauthentic. Although the freak-out
folk bandwagon's got ample room and more than enough beards and
barefootin' to sate the Appalachian fantasies of a thousand self-styled
troubadours, neo folk'n'blues really belongs to the true weirdos
like Entrance
Ashley Brown
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