Shadow Kingdom - Bob Dylan's live stream of sorts

 Bob Dylan's Shadow Kingdom 'livestream' adds like everything he does to his legend and his myth. Was it really a livestream, did the band play the songs live, did Bob mime the words hidden behind a vintage microphone, why the all new band, does the Bon Bon Club in Marseille really exist? 

Whatever the answers to those questions and the attendant conspiracy theories are is immaterial as the legend and the myth has been added to and then some.

Billed as the songs of a young Bob Dylan the selection of songs was definitely a choice of songs from a younger Bob Dylan - nothing from the recent 'Rough & Rowdy Ways' album. The 80 year old Bob reading his back pages was in my view a wonderous thing. The interpretations musically followed a format that that we've grown accustomed to recently a precise and simple blues with a smattering of rockabilly on the more up tempo tunes. Not a note wasted and not a note more. His voice is richer with age, and seems like the most important instrument. Songs of his younger days even his middle age take on a poignancy and truth that sure he was aiming at back then but age has given the wisdom to deliver them effortlessly. He is like an old bluesman knowing instinctively how to deliver these songs and catch that balance between recognition and freshness. He delivered that whatever the myths wrapped up and spun out of this livestream are or become.

In 2017 Dylan released  'Triplicate' a three disc set of covers taken from the great American songbook and watching Shadow Kingdom I came to the conclusion that Dylan has no real need for the great American songbook. It's pretty obvious really, his canon of work is its own great American song book with its own memories, myths and legends.  

Roselit Bone - Tales from the Psychotic side of Country

Roselit Bone residency at the Phoenix Bar Edinburgh

💀💀💀💀💀💀 Review

Roselit Bone, a band who tout a gothic country punk sound peppered with raw rockabilly and  mariachi rhythms are like a band from a fever dream infused with the nightmarish world of David Lynch. Yes that intriguing and startlingly good!

My route to finding them was that modern and slightly bizarre way I imagine lots of folk find new music these days -  though social media in a kind of accidental way. A friend sent me a request to like a bar back in April and instead of liking I clicked events and found Roselit Bone. I clicked interested for a gig in August and thought no more. Until August when an alert told an event I was interested in was coming up.

That was when I discovered that they were playing eighteen nights during the annual Edinburgh Fringe as part of the Free Festival. No pre-bought tickets, audiences just show up on the night....or don't. It took me a while to show my face to be true.

I finally made it along on the penultimate night of their run. My god. Why, oh why had I not made it along earlier in their run? The stripped down acoustic iteration of the band were both seriously odd and exceptionally powerful. Led by Josh McCaslin on vocals and guitar, aided and amply abetted by Faith Grossnicklaus on fiddle and Nate Lown on bass they had stage presence and then some. Josh and Nate's pale faces were highlighted with make-up which gave them the otherworldly demeanour of 1920s silent western actors and Faith, similarly pale skinned, channelling Rose Maddox, pulled off a glamourous cowgirl look with the twist of her own bird skull bolo and ear-rings.

They looked like the forlorn god children of The Panther Burns crossed with the Gun Club. The music was intense and evocative punctuated with yelps, howls and lonesome whines. The songs are sharply drawn tales of degradation, violence, lust, love, sex, murder and death. Cheery it ain't but  it is compellingly captivating. The sound and delivery, not to mention the presentation, pulls the susceptible into its vortex and beguiles like a siren song.

That siren song twisted into me and pulled me to the rocks not only that night but also the next night when I found myself making a journey back into that web of hopped up psychotic rock'n'roll deranged country that is Roselit Bone.

The band's first sojourn to Scotland was an epic run of gigs and my fear and joy is the realisation that had I made it along earlier in the run I may well have found the siren pulling me into the basement room at the Phoenix Bar on a nightly basis. Which would've been no bad thing. No bad thing at all.

https://www.roselitbone.com/

Albums 'Blister Steel' and 'Blacken and Curl' available here https://roselitbone.bandcamp.com/