GARY CLARK JR LIVE: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
GARY CLARK JR
Enmore Theatre, April 17
THE CLUE WAS IN HIS ENTRANCE. Long, extravagantly lean and topped by a high, wide and handsomely white hat, Texan Gary Clark Jr ambled on like he was just passing through. Like purpose was at his disposal. Like time was flexible, elastic even, and to be shaped not so much by will as by example. And it was.
Even as the band began playing, a long, atmosphere-heavy introduction was measured in its tempo but deliberately vague in its intentions, all possibilities open, like the slowly emerging synth in place of bass. Then this moody, chugging blues emerged and Maktub took shape: decidedly North African in its desert airy expansiveness, it suggested both movement and stasis, with Clark’s slide guitar in long strides rather than stealthy steps.
He sang of suspicion and resistance in the tone of someone wearied by the fight but not bent by it; he warned “just tell ‘em, we’re coming” but cautioned “we gotta move in the same direction”, with the patience of someone who has been this way before. And so it went, always undulating rather than surging, for almost 10 minutes, time immaterial.
And so it went for the rest of the night: as the hour mark ticked over, Clark and band – three (somewhat underutilised) backing vocalists, guitar, bass, drums and (much more utilised) keyboards – had only just started on their seventh song. There would be only four more, including an encore, in a show that came within touching distance of two hours.
In that time-defying space, variety was not as pronounced as in his most recent albums, which have seen Clark expand his remit well beyond Texas blues. Firstly, the heavier tread with a dusting of psychedelia that was the more traditional When My Train Pulls In, may have been less compelling across the distance, but Clark’s solo became a searing assertive presence that staked out the same ground. Later the smouldering Bright Lights began with a section of Blak & Blu done as a Lennonesque raw ballad, then accumulated anger like an auditor keeping score, until it spilled over the sides and he, and we, entered a labyrinth whose exit was almost academic.
Still, you could hear echoes of Parliament/Funkadelic in the loose, odd, rhythmically insistent Alone Together, and the controlled trippiness of What About Us brought the arthouse to the clubhouse, while the hands of Curtis Mayfield and D’Angelo – old soul and nu-soul - could be felt in R&B-driven numbers like the righteously moved Feed The Babies, the first time Clark’s falsetto emerged.
One of those predecessors would probably have encouraged Clark to shorten the too long preamble to the set’s closer, Habits, which seemed a culmination of the noodling that crept in during the final stages of the night, and served to speed the exit of some in the audience. But then the man might have responded by pointing out how the Catherine Wheel of a solo which climaxed said noodling and said night all but washed away such thoughts.
As if they, like time, didn’t matter.
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A version of this review ran originally in The Sydney Morning Herald.