Photo credit: Sara Bill
From the looks of them, Carry Ann Hearst and Michael Trent's duo of Shovels & Rope fill a kind of preordained niche. Do you like The White Stripes' punk blues and The Civil Wars' Southern gothic folkiness? Here you are, a married couple who plumbs the sweet spot between them.
Fortunately, Shovels & Rope are so much more layered in their approach than a mere marketing contrivance would allow, and, as they proved to a bustling Turner Hall Ballroom Saturday, arguably loads more fun than the above-mentioned easy points of visual comparison.
Unlike Jack and Meg White, Hearst and Trent are still hitched.Nor, like Joy Williams and John Paul White of The Civil Wars' waning days, are they at each others throats. Not only do the recent documentary about them and its director's music videos for the twosome bear out their affection for each other, so does their stage presence. And as a happily wed couple creating music together may be wont to do, they sing about their relationship. "Birmingham" stylistically recalls Steve Earle's early career, while the surf-injected "Cavalier" finds them poking fun at their defiance of musical classification.
Hearst is the more gregarious of the two, more of the force of nature, perhaps. Both she and her other half switch off between guitar and minimal drum kit, sometimes supplemented by a keyboard she'd play chordally with one hand while keeping the beat with the other. But she's more apt to speak between their songs with interjections of their explanation and the occasional excited profanity. And fine a singer as Trent can be in his more restrained fashion, Hearst's ebullient twang, like that of a relation in Lucinda Williams' and Loretta Lynn's hypothetically shared bloodline, makes her a natural focal point.
Their harmony extends from their matrimony to their musicality, too. Some of their prominent duet vocals on numbers such as "The Devil Is All Around" and "After the Storm" veer toward the thematically darker, yet redemptive, side of their repertoire. Elsewhere, as on "Gasoline," joy pervades with less shadow or nuance.
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Where Trent may be bashful in terms of vocal presence, he compensates duly on guitar. Especially when brandishing what looks like a hollow-bodied electric axe, he runs the gamut from a Chet Atkins sort of chime to a gnarly tone that finds the point where '60s garage rock morphs to nascent heavy metal. While he assays the latter side of that spectrum, especially hard and fuzzed out stabs from his wife on her keys manifest what could be the most psychedelic permutation in Americana/alt country. It's certainly more compelling than the rehashed '80s glam riffage distinguishes for much of what passes for testosterone-heavy commercial radio country nowadays.
And if opener John Fullbright overshadowed Trent vocally, neither he nor Hearst must mind. They, or mostly Hearst, spoke as genuine fans of the singer-songwriter whose acutely perceptive observations are earning him wide critical and peer recognition. Not every artist under 30 years old can count himself a Grammy nominee but that's what Fullbright became in the Americana album category thanks to his first studio album, From The Ground Up. His latest, with the audaciously plainspoken title of Songs, likely will merit similar recognition. With a stand-up bassist accompanying his own acoustic guitar, harmonica and piano, Fullbright's forceful, pliable baritone mined the turmoil and resignation in originals including "Satan and St. Paul" and "Until You Were Gone," as well as Dan Bern's recollection of a soldier returned from war, "After The Parade Is Over." At least a couple of people on Turner Hall's floor yelled out that they came for Fullbright.
