Album Reviews
Movies
Concert Reviews

Top 10
Resources
Contact Us

A great support is a great blessing and Jess Klein was as sweet a blessing as a Saturday night could bring. With just a guitar for the most part and adding little dabs of the Conspiracy when it felt appropriate she sang songs that for sure were songs and she introduced them with lovely detail. It is her voice that I remember now that I write about it. The sheer power and beauty of it. Without the slightest amount of effort she'd soar. I guess there was the tingiest shade of Nanci Griffith but so much younger, edgier and way, way cooler. Little White Dove and Goodbye, Goodbye were certainly stand outs but, of course, Ireland wooed the crowd and her story of Luka Bloom telling her that "going to Ireland to solve your problems was like going to New York to get away from it all or to George Bush's house for a serious conversation" added the humor.

Willard Grant Conspiracy are a sort of alternative country orchestra to best describe it. Seven of them all jamming away with fiddles and mandolins and slide guitars and keyboards and trumpets and harmonicas and all kinds of stuff. I sensed that it would be stripped back and to see the stage bulging with little room for swinging a hamster was a surprise. And it is stripped back and majestically almost touching the big music at times. It is tender and atmospheric and that atmosphere gets gloomy, pretty, quiet and beautifully loud. The first chord was so utterly gorgeous that I thought the angels had arrived to tell the shepherds something.

Then there is that voice of Robert Fisher. Fisher looks like your Sociology Professor who doubles as a poet at the English society. Then there his voice, deep and baritone. Making it sound downbeat even when it's about color and sun and happy, happy moments. There is a darkness too. Most of the time indeed. It's Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave both joined to the hip with Johnny Cash and there's murder and mercy at every turn. Indeed I was a little surprised by the amount of salvation or the hope of it kicking in. Jesus is here in the most unlikely of places and he is not the antagonist. The lesson for this late night Saturday night Mass was "I say salvation is in the smallest things/That life has to deliver". Amen! It was interesting to just check the web site and find that Fisher has the Baptist Church as an influence. Parental apparently. He has Flannery O'Connor in there too and that is it exactly. O'Connor becomes alternative country to live for a time among us.

Mojave is still the album for me and though "Evening Mass," "The Beautiful Song," and "Massachusetts" were excellent I was still left loving "Colour of the Sun" and "The Work Song" most of all, with Jess Klein adding perfect harmonies. Indeed I'd advise that they conspire to add Miss Klein to the orchestra for the fifth album that after tonight cannot come soon enough.