Tony Clayton-Lea reviews Aimee Mann at Vicar Street, Dublin, Brian O'Connell reviews Dwight Yokam at Marquee, Showgrounds, Cork, Andrew Johnstone reviews Lynda Lee, RTÉ NSO/Plondke at NCH, Dublin.
Aimee Mann
Vicar Street, Dublin
Literate, tall, willowy, blonde, one of the best songwriters of the past 15 years - where did it all go wrong for Aimee Mann? Nothing is wrong, of course; if Mann suffers from anything it's that her writing can be so predictably good. She travels a crazy-paving path already worn down by previous songwriters - the difference with her is that she looks at the cracks on the tiles, worries about the stress and tension levels that caused them, and comes up with a temporary fix. In this Mann's world, permanent emotional happiness seems as remote a possibility as peace in our time.
Her two-night stint at Vicar Street seems to have loosened Mann's tight grip. There's little doubt she's the controlling type and that her band, while providing often excellent texture and accompaniment, is hardly crucial to proceedings. Within this context she's generous to a fault, but you get the feeling that she could do just as well on her own. Live gigs, however, are not her favourite thing, so it makes sense that she surrounds herself with musicians who can create facsimiles of her album tracks. In this matter, the band does not disappoint. The music might sometimes play it safe and soft - indeed, there were at least three songs that made one pay more attention to the lack of audience reaction than to the figures on stage - but the words always reach out and grab your attention.
Focusing, in episodic stops and starts, on her latest album, The Forgotten Arm, Mann creates a series of evocative short stories about drifters who fall in love, and lovers who drift apart. The theme of love being severed by cutting remarks runs through her work like a viral infection, and the way in which she rarely comes up with happy endings is testament to her creative integrity.
Literate, tall, willowy, blonde, one of the best songwriters of the past 15 years - some people have all the luck. Not, however, if you're a character in an Aimee Mann song.
Tony Clayton-Lea
Dwight Yoakam
Marquee, Showgrounds, Cork
If, like me, you don't own a Stetson, or wear spurs (except for that one time), or honky-tonk all that well, then a Dwight Yoakam gig is probably not for you.
Yoakam first emerged at the tail end of the Paisley Underground movement, which basically took the best of Gram Parsons and laced it with psychedelic rock. What Yoakam was doing there was anybody's guess, yet with his pared-back approach to old-fashioned honky-tonk and Bakersfield country, he helped return country music to its roots, bluegrass or otherwise, in the late 1980s. Refusing to play by Nashville's rules, he consequently missed out on the stadium brand of country fever that swept America and beyond in the early 1990s. Playing to a half-full Marquee in Cork's Showgrounds, perhaps the thought struck him that a little compromise might have gone a long way.
First to get the sawdust rising was BR549, a bar band who emerged in the 1990s as raw as buckwheat. Vocalist Chuck Mead certainly knows how to holler, while lyrics such as "I woke up this morning and looked outside and all my land was gone" have appeal for both country folk and conservationists.
Later, Yoakam got off to a subdued start, although with boomy vocals and PA feedback a feature throughout the night, this was perhaps understandable. With 18 albums under his holster, he dipped in to his back catalogue, and for the most part the choices worked, especially his reworking of If There Was A Way, the title track of his fourth album. Yet, as one would expect, it was his take on other people's music that stood out, including a homage to John Prine and the late great "king of bluegrass", Jimmy Martin.
Guitars and Cadillacs got feet stomping, while a rousing encore of Queen's Crazy Little Thing Called Love threatened to lift the canopy. It's country, Jim Bob, but not as we know it.
Brian O'Connell
Lynda Lee, RTÉ NSO/Plondke
NCH, Dublin
Michael Torke - Javelin. Xavier Montsalvatge - Cinco canciones negras. Aaron Copland - Billy the Kid Suite. Sousa - Semper fidelis
Conceptual programming is a feature of the RTÉ summer lunchtime series, and just over a week after Independence Day the US conductor, James Plondke, directed the NSO in music by three of his compatriots and by a Catalan in transatlantic mode.
Xavier Montsalvatge's canciones negras are risqué texts by Caribbean poets set to original music with a pronounced Creole flavour. They were coolly sung by a statuesque Lynda Lee, whose lower register was the victim of some opaque accompaniment but who was undaunted by the exotic linguistics.
It wasn't just the cowboy tunes that made Aaron Copland's 1938 ballet, Billy the Kid, such a new departure in American music; it was also his creation of a novel and distinctly American orchestral idiom. This seminal work didn't come across as refreshingly as it might have done, however, because Plondke's tempos were too easy-going.
The torch ignited by Copland is now being carried by post-minimalist Michael Torke, whose festive rhapsody, Javelin, marked the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. In this performance, Torke's smart orchestration engendered equally smart playing.
Sousa once explained that his marches don't have any reprises in them for the same reason that diners don't go back to the main course after they've had dessert. A pity, then, that he didn't go on to cheese and biscuits in Semper fidelis, which brought the concert to a curiously abrupt ending.
Andrew Johnstone
