Sturgill Simpson
Vicar Street, Dublin
★★★★★
Somewhere in the middle of this packed-out, three-hour epic show, Kentuckian cosmic country maverick Sturgill Simpson recalls a query he often hears: “People ask me what kind of music do you play? I’ve no idea, man. All of it.” It’s a fair answer and if you happened to wander through Vicar Street at different time throughout the night, you’d find yourself in agreement.
After ambling out to a wild roar, Simpson and his band kick off with Turtles All The Way Down from his breakthrough 2014 album Metamodern Sounds In Country Music, easily the best song inspired by a heckle directed at Bertrand Russell. This is followed by the same record’s Living The Dream, then Some Days from his solo debut High Top Mountain, and One For The Road from last year’s reliably great Passage Du Desir. All could be classed as country soul, a hybrid of the two great strands of American music that Simpson has a seemingly easy mastery of.
But then out of that last song, which features a melodica on the recorded version, because Simpson does as he pleases, and a guitar solo tonight that David Gilmour would consider good work, they head off into a marvellous cover of The Allman Brothers’ Midnight Rider and this band, if that’s not too small a word for them, really start to stretch out.
Estonian guitar wizard Laur Joamets’s pedal steel is a keening orchestra during Welcome To Earth (Pollywog), the opening cut from 2016’s soul-drenched, Grammy-winning concept album A Sailor’s Guide To Earth (Simpson seems positively allergic to easy classification).
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Joamets is at it again with a slide sound akin to a glacier pushing through a paper wall for the psychedelic country of It Ain’t All Flowers, which then goes into a reggae vamp. From there, they take The Promise, a long forgotten 1980s synth pop hit by When In Rome, and imbue it with enough soul to make grown men and women weep.
Simpson, who for the most part lets the music do the talking, warns us against passing out and makes us do three squats just in case because “people aren’t used to seeing real bands”.
Perhaps the highlight is an aching cover of You Don’t Miss Your Water, where Simpson sounds like Waylon Jennings crossed with Otis Redding. Another highlight contender is Brace For Impact (Live A Little), where they morph into a 10-legged boogie machine, showing other bands how it’s done.
No, the highlight is definitely A Good Look, which starts off like ZZ Top with a dose of the barbecue meat sweats trying to cover Spirit In The Sky before speeding up to approximate Black Sabbath essaying T Rex’s Buick Mackane. It then borrows the feel of Creedence’s It Came Out Of The Sky before going into a furious instrumental version of Led Zeppelin’s Living Lovin’ Maid.
And just in case that wasn’t convincing enough, they adopt some 1970s Aerosmith sleaze for Best Clockmaker on Mars from 2019’s squelchy and fuzzy Sound & Fury, a title in part inspired by the Shakespeare quote that Simpson spotted on a stairwell wall when he played this venue in support of the late John Prine in 2017. We should also mention that last year’s Passage Du Desir was released under the alias of Johnny Blue Skies because Simpson always promised he’d only release a limited number of albums under his own name. Did I already mention that he does what he likes?
They play Johann Sebastian Bach as adapted by Procal Harum to finish with a blinding cover of A Whiter Shade Of Pale, a song I thought I never needed to hear again until I heard this crew do it.
It might be premature to be bandying about phrases like “gig of the year”, but I can positively guarantee this show will be in the running come December. The band, especially the unfairly gifted Joamets and Miles Miller, a drummer who could probably play a symphony on his hi-hats alone if he were so inclined, call to mind titans such as Little Feat and The Black Crowes in their pomp. At the centre of it all is Simpson, playing a Telecaster he never takes off because, like Richard Thompson, if you’re this good you only need one guitar for the whole show, and sporting a voice that could move a statue. Absolutely superb.
