STEVE EARLE – CAMDEN,
ROUNDHOUSE,
SUNDAY TIMES - 18TH FEB 2008
Emerging alone beneath the vast dome
of the Roundhouse in jeans and a plain green shirt, Steve Earle looks
like someone who has arrived to fix a washing machine, rather than
the man who reclaimed roots rock in the ‘80s and cleared the
path for the Alternative Country generation. Earle’s angry 2004
album The Revolution Starts Now was a superb example of The Hardcore
Troubadour and friends in full country-grunge mode, but here the absence
of any accompanists is desperately evident in songs like The Devil’s
Right Hand, as increasingly brutal downstrokes of the guitar struggle
to fill a void. In contrast, the gentler, fingerpicked numbers, including
Earle’s signature song My Old Friend The Blues, give the Roundhouse
the feel of an intimate folk club.
Then a large, pear-shaped man in black arrives, portending doom, to
provide programmed beats for selections from last year’s Washington
Square Serenade album. Earle decamped to New York to walk the streets
that shaped the ‘60s protest singers and tonight we’re
treated to a cut-and-paste Big Apple of downtown A trains, alphabet
city, and seventh avenue, over a budget backdrop that sounds like
a 1992 trip-hop version of the Steve Earle sound. In the increasingly
restless standing area before the stage, even elderly Uncut magazine
subscribers recognise this hybrid as an ill-advised experiment. We
should admire an established artist like Earle for challenging his
audience, thirty years into his career, but only an unaugmented Sparkle
And Shine really sparkles and shines, and even Earle’s wife,
and opening act, Alison Moorer, looked kind of shifty during her vocal
contributions to the latin-flavoured, genre-crossing landgrab City
Of Immigrants.
Earle was alone again for a closing run of crowd-pleasers, but the
room had already thinned around the edges when Earle took up the mandolin
for a beautiful version of The Galway Girl, reminding us of what he’s
capable of.











