David Grubbs is something of a legend – the connoisseurs’ post-rocker of choice. It’s no surprise that he’s packed out the cosy environs of the Albert even with the little fanfare afforded his performance. Or that fact that it’s a mercilessly cold, recession bitten Blue Monday night he’s playing on. Or that it costs an extortionate amount to see him.
So who is this unassuming, bookish gentleman? Grubbs started his career playing with Louisville, Kentucky pop-metal messiahs, Squirrel Bait, and hails from the same fertile Southern indie rock scene that gifted the world Slint amongst other chin-stroking fare. Decamping in Chicago, he went on to form the seminal, nineties outfit, Gastr del Sol with Jim O’Rourke. Meshing musique concrète, folk and jam-band Tropicália with a sense of audacious abandon that belied the pair’s studious persona, Gastr del Sol cemented Grubbs’s reputation as a major post-rock player way before the term was used to describe dire, instrumental indie bands. When O’Rourke jacked it in to be a big shot bassist in Sonic Youth, Grubbs continued exploring the outer limits of acoustic music with a series of challenging albeit rewarding solo albums. This deconstruction of the ‘singer-songwriter’ is what characterizes most of his recent output and new album, An Optimist Notes The Dusk, is no exception.
I was wary of the David Grubbs live experience though. A friend of mine had seen him play a few years ago and, apparently, he performed briefly before a reel to reel machine spewing noise and walking offstage to laugh from the sides at those still watching. No such sonic japery tonight as Grubbs takes the stage, unaccompanied, and eeks out of his amped up electric guitar Danny Whitten style slabs of warm, creamy, washes of love. Segueing seamlessly into Gethsemani Night, he has the audience enraptured and it’s clear we’re in the presence of some kind of quietly confidant maestro. The evening goes on thus with Grubbs playing most of his recent offering in this minimal style. It works well but tracks like An Optimist Declines feel slightly less weighty without his percussionist Michael Evans or the trumpet drones of Nate Wooley, both of whom adorn Grubbs’s recent offering with poignant poise. It’s a minor quibble though as Grubbs has enough chops, licks and modal phrasings to keep the faithful more than happy. You see, as academic as his music may well be – he’s a professor of Radio and Sound Art at Brooklyn College – Grubbs’s music is always from the heart and suffused with soulfulness. He taps into a rich vein of Americana and the fact that it comes out so aurally fractured, so ideologically fearless exemplifies what Grubbs still is at heart: a punk rock kid from Kentucky.
Tags:
David Grubbs, Live, Rock, Singer Songwriter, Sonic Youth
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