The night’s triple bill was as jangled as one can imagine. While Earth, Sir Richard Bishop, and James Blackshaw focused on sounds coaxed from guitar, the hands doing the work were from three completely different worlds. James Blackshaw’s work is intricate and deliberate, transforming 12 strings into a symphonic work based around simplistic raga melodies. Richard Bishop is much more cunning, choosing to transform his own six strings into Mediterranean pastels and cheeky reinterpretations. Meanwhile, Dylan Carlson’s approach to guitar is uniquely his own, as he manipulates modest drones from crafted blues slides and subdued riffage. Despite the perceived differences, however, each act had something more in common that we were all to discover as the night wore on.
James Blackshaw quietly opened the show. As soon as he began strumming, the once scattered crowd lumped together group-by-group to gaze at the wonderment that is Blackshaw and his fingers. Much like his recorded material, one gets lost in the easy flow that Blackshaw creates. Minds begin to wander, thinking about the day’s events. Once disposed, the mind continues to quickly drift back to younger memories — all the while Blackshaw produces his dreamy melodies. Your childhood begins to adopt 12-string lullabies-as-soundtrack, as the steely plucks reverberate from stage to wall. There is little to differentiate Blackshaw’s live iteration from his recorded output, though there’s a richness to be gained by standing in a crowded club as each note bounces from one person to the next before reaching your ear. Blackshaw tore through material from his upcoming The Glass Bead Game and politely exited the stage
If Blackshaw left like a lamb, Richard Bishop came storming in like a lion. Bishop wasted no time delving into his erratic and cutting guitar ruminations. Whereas Blackshaw forms melodious, well-rounded ragas that sing with high notes and twinkle like stars, Bishop picks and plucks at each string with the fury of a lumberjack, as if he’s determined to split each in two to prove a point. His set began with much of the Eastern ideas that have graced his recent output, Polytheistic Fragments. Slowly, the mood changed, as Bishop drifted into a more classic rock sound. The songs began to rise and fall to match his breathing. Bishop would hack out a stanza with an unseen — but easily heard — anger while apologetically caressing those same strings to create a piece of beauty and sorrow. Bishop finished his set by inviting James Blackshaw and new Seattle resident Ben Chasny (who was in the crowd for much of the evening) onstage. The ensuing chaos not only found the crowd clutching to cameras, but found the trio slowly building their own unique styles into a ball of frenzied guitar. When the collaboration reached its overpowering climax, it was difficult to tell which guitar was loudest, but every audience member was standing on their tiptoes waiting for it all to fall apart into a glorious mess.
Earth claimed the stage shortly after Bishop, Blackshaw, and Chasny finished their jobs. Dylan stood alone with the band’s new cellist waiting for the rest of the band to get their asses onstage. The band kicked off the set with “Omens and Portents I: The Driver” and proceeded to trudge through the tar that is their sound. It’s hard to explain Earth’s music — for as simple and derivative as it may seem, it’s a calculated morass of thick blues and deconstructed rhythms. Earth is a niche all its own, despite being tagged with the ‘stoner rock’ moniker for quite some time. There is plenty of musical evidence to back up such an assertion, and I don’t doubt for a second that if Earth were sharing a bill with a methodical jamband, they’d be all over etree.org for long-jam aficionados to devour. ‘Earth’ would probably be the best describer of Earth, for as the set flowered, it was as if each clumsy cymbal shot, each impromptu organ stroke, and each slack-jawed bassline was coming up from The Tractor’s foundation. Dylan and company were meticulously destroying the old crust and building a new one at 33 1/3 speed, and no one cared if they were swallowed whole.
