A new album from bearded, intense, not-exactly-comfortable-in-the-world folk soul singer Ray LaMontagne has just been released, his eighth. The reviews for Long Way Home are positive, the songs pretty good, and it looks like the intensity hasn’t really turned down much.
When he made his first trip to Australia, in 2005, in the wake of his debut album, Trouble, the room was small, the hype was minimal, but the impact substantial. At least for those who were there. Which is where Wind Back Wednesday has landed.
Warning: the review does contain some righteous bitching about audience behaviour. Set your grumble level to medium/high. It also has a prediction. Set your scepticism mode to moderate. Done it? Good. On we go.
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RAY LAMONTAGNE
Gaelic Club, November 4, 2005
IN YEARS TO COME, this show, this tour, will be one of those that many more people than could possibly have fit in will claim to have attended. Although Ray LaMontagne had played on the under-bill for Missy Higgins' Centennial Park show a week earlier, as happened with the first Jeff Buckley and Ben Harper shows in Sydney a decade ago, there was a palpable sense that we were part of the early stages of someone special.
It's too early to say whether LaMontagne is as significant as Buckley or even whether he will last as long as Harper has: we have after all only one album on which to judge. But in his passion-driven melange of American roots and soul, his intense stage manner (he could well be the dictionary definition of "tortured artist", barely able to look at the audience and greeting each rapturous round of applause not with a smile with a nervous flattening of his hair) and a voice that in its huskiness and sweetness brings to mind at various times Van Morrison, Otis Redding and the Band's Richard Manuel, he has everything he needs to demand attention.
Of course being Sydney, attention is something he struggled to get. You have to wonder at the mentality if not sheer bloody rudeness of people who paid and then spent the show talking loudly and intrusively over the quiet sounds coming from the stage. (LaMontagne began the show solo on acoustic; when his band arrived it was only acoustic upright bass and drums; and the encore was another solo effort.)
And don't blame just the music industry freeloaders up the back for talking. They're shockers all the time but as anyone who has spent any time in the Hopetoun, Annandale or indeed any hotel where music is played in Sydney will tell you, people will not shut up and listen anymore. Oh they clapped and cheered at the end of each song for LaMontagne, but not long enough to interrupt their absolutely vital conversations.
Somehow, through this clatter LaMontagne kept shining, kept ripping open the stitches on the whole series of emotional wounds which feed his music. It felt right and it felt special. You will want to see him next time he comes by. Let's just hope that it's in a seated venue. Or in Melbourne.
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