The concert reviews I am in the habit of writing usually retreat into the safety of narrative. The night begins, I describe the venue and the atmosphere, the music progresses and reaches a crescendo. Perhaps there is an encore. If there are any standout moments, whether small or grand, I remark upon them. If there are any particularly special songs, I praise them. If there are any remarks or stories from the musicians on the stage, I try to recall them faithfully.
This was true of the last review I wrote of LA LOM, in the Jazz Café in London back in August. But in the days after returning from Leeds for this latest gig, I find myself struggling to do so again. It is not that the night has been lacking in special songs, or standout moments, or vibrant atmosphere. Even the venue, which looked unpromising – a repurposed 1950s social club in a frighteningly run-down part of town – was faultless, its drab, throwback exterior revealing a surprisingly revitalised interior of musical energy and communal strength.
No – instead, the reason why the attempt to write a narrative of the night runs like sand through my fingers is because LA LOM themselves are better described elementally, as one might a lightning strike or breach of sunlight through a dark canopy. Their power cannot be communicated narratively, by describing the cheers as they arrive on stage, the songs they burst into, or the roars for an encore as they leave – roars that are answered with a thunderous, pulsing coda of ‘El Sonido de Los Mirlos’, somehow outdoing the ferocious ‘La Danza Del Petrolero’ and ‘El Cascabel’ which ended their main set. One could describe the dancing throb of the audience, the enthusiastic trills of some of the women in the crowd, or try to evoke the heavy feel of body heat as a mass of hundreds give themselves over to the music.
One could describe the band themselves. An instrumental band; a singular, intoxicating mix of Latin sounds – cumbia, chicha, bolero – with touches of Americana soul and rock and roll. I could describe, on my side of the stage, Zac Sokolow grinning in an open red shirt, his black-and-copper Kay electric guitar barking and singing with the dexterity of a lead singer, close enough for me to see its veneer beginning to wear. Behind him, Nick Baker seated behind a hybrid drum kit of his own configuration: classic drums matched with congas and a cowbell, played with drumsticks and with his bare hands, sometimes with one drumstick while his hand plays a beat on the conga, and sometimes with maracas as drumsticks for an impossibly cool blend of percussive sounds. And, at the far end of the stage, Jake Faulkner all in black, sometimes silhouetted in the stagelights. Alternating between electric and stand-up bass, he is also the band’s cheerleader, jumping and whipping the crowd into heightened motion and howling wild aullidos at cathartic moments of the songs.
And one could certainly collate moments, if only a narrative could be found to hold them. Some are moments common to any LA LOM gig, all part of the passionate show this trio are capable of performing. The familiar live riffs of ‘El Paso Del Gigante’ and ‘Dane Dane Benleri’. The similarly recognisable ones of ‘Santee Alley’ and ‘Danza de LA LOM’ pulled straight from their records. The swaying of Zac as he manipulates his guitar into singing, and standing broad-legged as he deploys the heavy Led Zeppelin-esque riff of ‘Alacrán’. The effortless shifts in tempo that allow Nick to run free on his drums. The theatricality of Jake spinning his stand-up bass during ‘Alacrán’, and holding that same massive bass over his head like a colossus at the end of the set.
Other moments are ones that would add flavour to a narrative of this particular night. ‘Angels Point’, the band’s signature song, being played surprisingly early, just three songs into the set; a series of unreleased originals also making the setlist and suggesting their best is yet to come. ‘Alvarado’, introduced by Zac as the first song they wrote together, being one of three songs they play tonight from their first self-titled EP. The moment when Zac opens a metal tin on his pedalboard and takes out a toothpick that he chews on in between riffs; the moment when Nick drops his maracas quickly at his feet as Zac’s guitar launches straight into another song, or when Jake is wrongfooted because of the same – but only for a moment, mind, for all three members of the band can play off one another with ease. And Zac’s other guitar, a distinctive red 1960s National Val-Pro, being placed on its stand by a roadie shortly before the band take the stage, and yet remaining there, completely untouched, throughout the night, as though the worn black-and-copper Kay that Zac carries out instead refuses to be put down.
I can mention all this, but not place it into a simple narrative. LA LOM provide ninety minutes on the stage tonight that is of a power you cannot parse, except in recognising their music as something elemental, that would be better understood by something like the free poetic allusions of Pablo Neruda’s Elemental Odes than by any humble review composed by a man stood in the audience to the right of the Brudenell stage. Elemental then, or perhaps quantum; something that is everywhere all at once, impossible to measure or to grasp except where light shines on it. And how to measure when that selfsame band are the ones bringing the light?
Such is a night witnessing the music of LA LOM.
Setlist:
(all songs from the album The Los Angeles League of Musicians and written by Zac Sokolow, Jake Faulkner and Nick Baker, unless noted)
Café Tropical (from LA LOM EP)
Lucia
Angels Point
Santa Ana Serenade (unreleased)
Los Sabanales (Calixto Ochoa) (unreleased)
El Paso Del Gigante (Albert Tlahuetl) (from Live at Thalia Hall)
Alvarado (from LA LOM EP)
Delta 88 (unreleased)
Cumbia Sampuesana (José Joaquín Bettin Martínez) (from Live at Thalia Hall)
Rosecrans (unreleased)
Santee Alley (from LA LOM EP)
Alacrán (single)
Wilshire Western (unreleased)
Dane Dane Benleri (Neşet Ertaş) (unreleased)
Danza de LA LOM
Lorena
La Subienda (Senén Palacios) (unreleased)
Magnolia (unreleased)
6th St. (unreleased)
Astro Cumbia (unreleased)
Figueroa
La Danza Del Petrolero (Emerson Casanova Sanchez) (unreleased)
El Cascabel (Lorenzo Barcelata) (unreleased)
Encore: El Sonido de Los Mirlos (Gilberto Reátegui) (unreleased)
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet, ACT 1, SCENE 4, 119-120
Mere seconds into the night of music and the touchpaper is already lit. In what surely ranks as the most triumphant performance by an opening act I’ve yet seen, Dan MacDonald climbs onto the stage of the packed room above Gullivers bar and, without so much as a ‘hello’, begins strumming lustily on his acoustic guitar. He tears through a sea shanty in a fine, high-spirited voice, his hair flopping as he plays.
By the time the chorus comes around a second time the boisterous Friday-night crowd is already fully committed. “Hi ho, hi ho, we’re bound for Callao,” the crowd roars, swaying back and forth to the shanty. The American on the stage breaks into a grin, one that matches the one of the Halloween pumpkin on his orange shirt. He’s pleased that his kindling has immediately caught fire. “I should quit now!” he jokes at song’s end. “I don’t think it gets better than that song!”
It’s a stirring start, and one the musician is keen to continue. He picks up a fiddle, and while his second song, ‘Right Misty Day’, is slower and more delicate than its predecessor, the crowd stomps its feet in time and loudly cheers its end. “I made it, mom!” Dan shouts. “We all made it. We all did this together.”
It’s an unexpected triumph. I didn’t know what to expect from the opener coming into the night, but it wasn’t the bright cluster of winsome folk songs that the Michigan native is currently delivering. His stage name, Spitzer Space Telescope, might bring to mind a zany prog-rock band or hidden-away electronica project, but the music is anything but. He has eight songs in his half-hour set tonight, and while I’m not yet familiar enough with his music to place a few of his songs – including that opening ‘Bound for Callao’, which stays stuck in my head for days after – I resolve that I will be.
The songs are quality, the performances even more so. His third song, ‘Kayne in the Orchard’, about his memories of doing seasonal work on a cider farm in Cornwall, is delivered a cappella, as is a fifth song I cannot source, and both hold the audience transfixed throughout. His fourth and sixth songs, ‘Old Lazarus’ Harp’ and ‘Rovin’ is Me Pleasure’ are faster numbers, with foot stomps accompanying Dan’s fiddle and guitar respectively.
After another short fiddle tune, Dan launches lustily into his final ‘Midwest Tribute Song’. Deserved cheers again greet its end, and another cheer is raised as he walks back through the crowd. Spitzer Space Telescope has been everything you want an opener to be and more; he has whipped up the crowd and prepared the ground for the main act, while compelling you to remember the name once the night is out, for his is music you should explore as the first priority. It’s a fitting performance, because I only became aware of tonight’s main act, Sam Shackleton, after he opened for Oliver Anthony in September. If Sam was a revelation that night, a sort of Scottish Nick Shoulders leading me to be here at Gullivers tonight, then Dan is a similar revelation.
In the half-hour wait between the end of the opening set and Sam Shackleton’s arrival on stage, the music coming from the soundsystem returns. There’s been Bill Withers, Dire Straits, a plethora of Creedence songs. And Bob Dylan.
Dylan’s is a name that occurs to me frequently tonight. Not because I would be foolish enough to compare his songwriting genius to either of tonight’s musicians – most of Sam’s setlist tonight is made up of traditional songs, although his few self-penned ones are perfectly respectable – but because listening to Spitzer Space Telescope and Sam Shackleton tonight has that same folk power you feel when listening to early Dylan or Baez or the other champions of the folk revival. The hearty folk melodies. The lusty singing. For Sam the bold harmonica and for Dan the piercing fiddle, and for both the rhythmic strumming of guitar strings that sounds like a knock on the door that houses the troubadours of old, and bids them come forth. As the crowd stomps on the floor of the room above Gullivers bar tonight, and the guitar chords strum confidently from the stage, one could quite easily imagine this selfsame scene taking place in barrooms across our isles at any point in the last few hundred years. Only the occasional flash of a mobile phone reminds you that the year is 2026.
When Sam Shackleton does take the stage, bumping shoulders with me as he walks through the front of the crowd, it’s for what is only his second-ever headline show in England. (The first was twenty-four hours earlier, in London.) As he says nearly two hours later, towards the end of his impressive set, he’s starting to try doing his own headline shows after years of opening. On this evidence, he’ll be a success. The Manchester crowd loves him.
Sometimes it loves him a bit too much. It’s no Ball of Kerrymuir, but a few times when introducing his songs Sam is knocked out of his stride by drunken hecklers crossing the line from enthusiastic shouting to obnoxious yelling and Main Character Syndrome. He deals with it genially each time in his warm Scottish brogue – “I’ll forgive ya, maybe not a second time”; “Alright, that’s the last one”; “that’s lovely, my friend” – but it’s clear he knows the culprits have given themselves too long a leash. After one particularly banal bout of chanting from a woman near the front, a weary male cry comes up from towards the back of the room. “Ah, shuddup,” the voice says, and the room murmurs in agreement. “Well, he said it,” Sam smiles, diplomatically letting the hecklers know which side he’s on.
In truth, even in their excess the hecklers can’t disrupt the night too much, because a set of raucous folk songs sung in a thick Scottish accent is pretty much guaranteed to rattle heartily along the rails, even while the music is strong enough to ensure it doesn’t careen off them entirely. ‘Rattlin’ Roarin’ Willie’, Sam’s opening song, sets the tone. Delivered a cappella by Sam with a pint of Guinness in hand, he tolls a simple drumbeat with the pedalboard at his feet. This percussion can be heard throughout the night, save for when it is outmatched by the foot-stomping of the crowd.
Sam follows the song with two of his staples, the murder ballad ‘Eggs and Marrowbone’ and ‘The Overgate’, a “failed love song”, on his acoustic guitar. But it’s his lesser-known picks of traditional songs that stand out in the first part of his set; the “sailing ballad” ‘Banks of Newfoundland’ and ‘Fair and Tender Ladies’, and the wonderful Rabbie Burns-penned ‘Green Grow the Rashes O’. The Scotsman will be devastated to learn it’s not the best Rabbie Burns I’ve ever heard, nor even the best I’ve heard at Gullivers – that honour remains with Toria Wooff’s stunning version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ here just a couple of months ago – though it’s a fine display of balladry regardless.
If the elfin Toria could stun the Gullivers crowd into silence – in what must be a first for the song, we all forgot to sing along to ‘Auld Lang Syne’ – Sam’s invocation of Scotland’s national poet is, at the very least, saving him a wee bit of money. After his performance of ‘Ye Scottish by Name’, which reimagines Burns’ ‘Ye Jacobites by Name’ as a song about modern Scottish independence, a bald, bearded man who had left and returned to the front row passes a glass up to the raised stage.
“Oh, a pint of Guinness, I’ll accept that,” Sam says in surprise. “That’s one interruption I don’t mind at all.” The man in question can be found dancing and pumping his fists at the front all night, showing that enthusiastic engagement with the music can be done right without disruption to anyone else’s vibe. At the end of the night, Sam will lean down and chat with his beverage-bunging benefactor, handing him a requested setlist.
In a fine foreshadowing of where the night is heading, Sam roars lustily through the “Glasgow street song” ‘Johnny Laddie’, inciting a boozy singalong from a crowd which is only increasing in energy and raucous temper. As he sets his guitar against a stack of plastic crates and picks up his banjo, the crates collapse. His scheme to use them as an improvised guitar stand gang agley, he recovers to lead the crowd steadily through the banjo-backed beat of ‘Sweet Snowy North’ and ‘The Lone Prairie’, showcasing his winning synergy of native folk flavours with their American cousins.
The banjo becomes more propulsive on ‘Wild Bill Jones’, before rearing up for the slower, pensive, almost waltz-like ‘The Butcher Boy’, a “sad song about suicide”. Sam’s plaintive whistles accentuate its lonesome sound.
“I promise that’s as miserable as it gets,” Sam says after the song ends. “It’s only up from here after that one.” And he’s not wrong, for next up are the three best performances of the night. He introduces ‘Tramps and Hawkers’ as one of his favourite Scottish ballads, and it’s another lusty, propulsive song well-judged for this stage of the setlist. The crowd is only too happy to singalong to the chorus once they pick it up.
It’s followed by yet another lusty singalong, this time to ‘Gambling Davey’, with Sam recapturing the same propulsive beat he has just let go in ‘Tramps and Hawkers’. Sam says he forgot to sing it in London the night before and a man came up and said he was sad he hadn’t played it. There’s no such disappointment in Manchester as the Gullivers crowd claps and stomps, and perhaps the loudest cheers of the night greet its end.
The best song, however, is about to arrive. As we enter the endgame, Sam Shackleton straps one of those harmonica contraptions to his chest. “This is the latter stage of my set now,” he says. “So I’m gonna play you some belters.”
In a break from what’s come before, Sam now plays some of his own self-penned tunes, starting with what I consider his best – and the best song on the night, too. Trading banjo for the insistent strumming of his acoustic guitar, and now accompanied by a stirring harmonica sound, Sam summons forth the fatalistic and foreboding ‘Weary Rambler’.
It’s an exciting indication of where this young Scotsman may yet roam with his talent, followed by the similarly-excellent ‘The Blackest Crow’ and the crowd-pleasing singalong ‘Scottish Cowboy’. He admits he ought to start playing more of his own songs in his sets, and the crowd agrees. Someone shouts for his ‘Pink Collar Blues’ – “that’s actually coming”, he says, “so you’re good” – and while he doesn’t play the requested ‘Summer Sailor’, he does play the similar ‘Song to a King’.
Shortly before he plays ‘Pink Collar Blues’ to end his set, a cathartic song about punching your employer when you’re in a shit job, he’s inundated with more such requests. “That’s a good one too,” he says diplomatically. “I gotta start writing these down.” He pauses. “Actually, I have. They’re my own songs, aren’t they? Hmm.” As the crowd laughs, one hopes that he has gained encouragement from these requests, even if tonight’s 11pm curfew means he can’t fulfil them. Now that Sam is beginning to blossom as a headline act, the expanded setlists might mean his own songwriting has space to grow. One hopes he recognises it. He could rove far.
But for now, it’s the traditional songs which form the tried-and-true backbone of his set. He introduces ‘Old Rosin the Bow’ by name, drawing an audible gasp from a handsome blonde woman near the front. And after hiding comically behind the stage’s dark green curtain as the crowd shouts for an encore (“How fuckin’ stupid was tha’?” he says when he returns. “That’s what every encore is, really.”), it is the traditional songs that carry us home.
Sam doesn’t play one of my favourite folk songs among those he’s been known to cover, ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’ (a song enjoying a new lease of life lately due to its use in the Oscar-nominated From Dusk Till Dawn remake Sinners), but instead he ends with the on-the-nose political song ‘All You Fascists’ and finally returns, of course, to Rabbie Burns.
There comes, at the death, the first and only boos of the night – and only because Sam has announced to the buzzing crowd that “this is the last song of the night”.
“That’s OK,” he laughs among the ironic boos. “I’ll take that.”
And with that he picks up his banjo for his final song, ‘MacPherson’s Rant’ by the ubiquitous Burns. “Play a tune and we’ll dance to the moon ‘neath the gallows tree,” he sings to end this special Friday evening at Gullivers bar. It’s a fitting coda to the night, a rousing, high-spirited singalong as the voices of Sam Shackleton and his rowdy crowd “set MacPherson free”.
Setlist:
(all songs are traditional folk songs of unknown authorship, unless noted)
Recent Comments