To The Spitz last night, to hear Guy Blakeslee, aka Entrance, the 23-year-old singer-songwriter from Baltimore. We caught him at Bristol, supporting Antony and the Johnsons, and he impressed us enough to make the effort to get to London and a gig with him as the main act. It was well worth it.
Where to start? His voice is extraordinary and immediately striking. Not everyone is going to like it: 'dilating country-blues songs into distorted Velvet Underground-inspired drones, with alternately hypnotic and disturbing results. Your enjoyment … may depend largely on your tolerance for octave-leaping vocal histrionics … but when it works … it's strange and magical' (The Guardian, reviewing his album Wandering Stranger). He's left-handed and plays a flipped-over, right-handed guitar strung upside-down. Whilst this is, in its own way, something you notice, it's his love of sharply varied rhythms and ear for both harmonies and dissonances that work to create a powerful stage performance. All this and the very Sixties dress sense (my photos are in this Flickr set) — plus the ankle-bells, the little tambourine-drum (whose "skin" gave out last night) — and it's no wonder that he has a presence out of all proportion to his slight frame. At both Bristol and The Spitz, Guy Blakeslee (and his typist-accompanist, who also, last night, played hand-bells and a variety of other homely … beat-marking "instruments") was always compelling, often mesmeric and at his best hit a register that was moving and beautiful.
The range of influences he has absorbed is considerable: blues, rock and roll, Dylan, punk, non-Western … His own website:
ENTRANCE willingly admits the influence of Black Sabbath and Delta blues singer Skip James, but has received comparisons to such vastly different artists as Jeff Buckley, Richie Havens, T. Rex, Syd Barrett, Bob Dylan, John Fahey, P.J. Harvey, Ravi Shankar, and even the White Stripes. Never taking for granted the freedom afforded by not having to lead or follow other players, ENTRANCE rarely plays a song the same way twice, and his performances are often radically different, as each piece has unlimited space to expand and contract on a spontaneous whim, re-interpreted for the energy of the occasion. Cover songs, such as Robert Johnson's blues staple "Love in Vain," are transformed into detailed odysseys of exploration, free form collages of shifting rhythm and tempo, melodic extrapolations and respectfully altered lyrics. His own compositions are even more loose, open to endless variation (and broken strings), but always convey the unspoken themes of his music: freedom, transcendence, anger, joy, wildness ...
And this from Fat Possum Records:
Entrance’s raw materials are the basic vocabulary of vintage rural music, Delta Blues and the “folk” traditions that eventually gave way to honky tonk and C&W, but even more so the extraordinary fluidity and spontaneity that early blues and country performers lived and died by. His secret weapon is a remarkably powerful singing voice that he tends to wield with reckless abandon, soaring, howling, breaking into eerie falsetto. … Whether there are two people or 2000 in the room; whether he’s alone onstage stomping a tambourine or supported by other hands and bodies…“I always throw my mind out the window and close my eyes until whoever is in charge pulls the plug.”
I'd make mention, in particular, of his unaccompanied singing — unaccompanied by guitar, that is, but with ankle-bells and tambourine-drum (or just his own clapping): both at Bristol and last night he sang a negro spiritual in this way and the intensity is not something I'll forget quickly. (Entrance, noun: the action of coming or going in, the coming of an actor upon the stage. Entrance, verb: to throw into a trance.) After the gig, he told me that these two songs hail from the collection, Goodbye Babylon. I was also very moved by 'A Farewell to my Friends', whilst 'I'm So Glad' (Skip James) was hugely exuberant — against the grain of its lyrics.
There's a fine review of Honey Moan here and one of The Kingdom of Heaven must be taken by storm here (both from PopMatters). (Two shorter pieces about The Kingdom of Heaven must be taken by storm here and here.)
Update (19.7.2005): Pitchfork's review of Wandering Stranger.
