LOCATION: Rhythm Room, Phoenix, AZ
LINEUP: Karin, Linford, Jake Bradley, Mickey Grimm
REVIEW BY:
mjbialas:
Over the Rhine dazzles Rhythm Room
By Tracy Collins
The Arizona Republic
Sept. 26, 2007 12:00 AM
Karin Bergquist's voice has been known to carry 3,000-seat venues with ease, providing a range and sultry smoothness through the menagerie of musical styles played by her band, Over the Rhine.
In front of about 170 people in a packed Rhythm Room in Phoenix on Sept. 25, she blew the crowd away with little strain but plenty of effort.
With a sound - and a four-piece band - that could barely be contained by the venue's small stage, Bergquist showed off most of a terrific new album she wrote with her husband and band mate, Linford Detweiler.
The couple is prolific, releasing 17 albums since a 1991 debut and writing with a consistency that led Paste magazine to name them one of the 100 best living songwriters. All of those skills are brought into play in their latest release, The Trumpet Child.
Those songs played well in concert as Bergquist, Detweiler, bassist/guitarist Jake Bradley and drummer Mickey Grimm threw a variety of styles and sounds at the audience. Bradley had solos on stand-up bass, electric bass and electric guitar, while Grimm was fascinating to watch as he caressed, raked, tapped and pounded nearly every available surface on his drum kit, often coming perilously close to falling backward into the crowd if he got moving too much. Detweiler played piano, organ, guitar and bass, and Bergquist added guitar, finger snaps and maracas, and even pounded on a well-dented cookie sheet, to get just the right sound.
Over the Rhine's recent, critically acclaimed albums Ohio (2003) and Drunkard's Prayer (2005) leaned heavily on soulful, aching vocals from Bergquist. The Trumpet Child brings more cabaret style, sly songs of lust with the feel of a musical tour through old New Orleans.
It brought a bewildering range of styles to the show, but the terrific musicianship and Bergquist's drop-dead-gorgeous vocals and charismatic stage presence offered a steadying thread throughout.
Bergquist and Detweiler spoke of strong influences from country, gospel and Americana music, and those flavors are distinctive in the new songs. So were other influences, both in the pair of covers the band performed (Gillian Welch's Orphan Girl and the Otis Blackwell classic Fever, a song covered by everyone from Elvis to Peggy Lee but never done better than in Bergquist's understated sultriness), and in the names they drop in their songs. Listen closely, and you'll hear references from Johnny Cash to Steve Earle to Neil Young to Emmylou Harris to Tom Waits.
The band at times nearly tripped over one another, squeezing through instrument changes or even errands to get water, at one point prompting Bergquist to joke, "This stage is even smaller than our conversion van." But the intimacy the Rhythm Room provided was priceless to the crowd, none of whom was more than 15 yards from the stage.
Bergquist and Detweiler promoted that intimacy with several long stories before songs - though Bergquist's shorter toss-off lines like "this here's a trashy little number I wrote" before Who'm I Kiddin' But Me were equally entertaining. She also regaled the crowd of the six years she spent as a child in Phoenix, living not far from the Rhythm Room and collecting as pets "a bucket of toads."
At no time was the intimacy better highlighted than when Bergquist recognized an old high school friend in the front row, Lynn Neal of Phoenix. It sent the singer off on a path of reminiscence about their high school days in the coal mining town of Barnesville in southeast Ohio. They congratulated each other on escaping the town, but Bergquist added, "When I was mature enough to look back, I saw that what I was running from was me. And I would have done that wherever I was, whether I was in Phoenix or Barnesville."
It is Phoenix's loss that she didn't write about this town, because
the landscapes (physical and emotional) that she paints while writing about
those days in the song Ohio are breathtaking. She dedicated the song to
Neal in one of the finest moments in an evening full of them.