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.