The southern states are ripe with unflattering associations, of stark wilderness, boredom, and lawlessness. But from these miseries and mysteries come potent and evocative music. So there is no question that Sean Rowe, from Albany, New York, is at least aware of the Deep South. And for intentional or accidental reasons, his music resembles the delta blues, down to the sad, downturned notes, deep vocals, proclamations of danger, and eerie storytelling of old women and black Dodges abandoned on the side of the road. Rowe places no limits on his lyrical landscape. He leads us from the ineffable corners of the male psyche to the driveways and lawns of American farm-towns, to space, and, of course, those cracks in the universe. In a deep, thundering whisper, Rowe tells us, “If you want to see dark, get out of the light,” and we remember that same dark message from Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem,” where we’re told in the same style, “There’s a crack in everything, that’s where the light gets in.” This is non-fiction poetry through the lens of a man struck deeply by the simultaneous beauty and horror of his own memories. “Old Black Dodge” stood out among the last few songs of Rowe’s set. It felt unmistakably cinematic as he weaved a story about a kind of lost innocence clad in images of quivering nature against stagnant culture: “Hey Jesus what’s that line I keep hearing in the wilderness of my own mind? Old black Dodge on the side of the road, I shouldn’t have stopped, but how could I know?” Rowe’s writing is sparse, but his delivery is wrought with sentiment and character. His last song was a Richard Thompson cover about a “Dangerous man in black leather, in trouble with the law since he was seventeen,” which fit in nicely. With a literary penchant for combining finite images of ordinary household items (wine glasses, cold floors, picture frames) with the “what if…” spirals of human drama, Rowe sinks into the background and settles in as a troubled yet worthy narrator.
Mr. Rowe was in good company opening for Brett and Rennie Sparks of the Handsome Family, some other troubled and worthy narrators from the North with a crush on the South. Contrary to their melancholy aesthetic, the duo is surprisingly good-humored and sharp tongued. In true comedian fashion, they started by greeting Portland with a story about their last experience here: “We toured through here once… under the name "YOU SUCK! WHERE’S WILCO?!" Yeah, it was snowing …. I kept thinking about all those bridges … and how I wanted to jump off one.” Brett and Rennie’s dark and witty banter continued all night, giving the audience some amusing bonus material to chew on and spit back at them between songs. Perplexed by their fans’ dedication, they segued from a story about their song “So Much Wine” being used (regretfully) as audition material for "American Idol," to a story of a misguided Spaniard’s interpretation of “Sad Milkman” being about erect milkmen in England: “He wanted to feel like a bucket of milk or sweet summer wind on rolling, green hills. …To fly up from the roof sailing up through the night wind to the arms of the moon. But the moon, she rises.” The crowd was in stitches.
My first introduction to the Handsome Family was through “Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus,” a documentary-style film narrated by alt-country singer Jim White. While White leads us through the lonely stretches of Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama, searching for “The gold tooth in God’s crooked smile,” the Handsome Family provides a memorable section of the soundtrack with a performance from a crumbling front porch set sail on a lake.
They ended their set with four encore songs including a request of “Probably the most depressing song we’ve ever written,” “Drunk by Noon,” during which a handful of audience members sang along, smiling, “If my life lasted only one day, I’d still be drunk by noon.”
