Elvis Perkins

A melancholy party, a cheerful funeral. A village band playing at the dawn of judgment day. Elvis Perkins lands with his troupe of musicians in a gloomy, chilly Milan, bringing with him a fair of dances and confessions, in which the sense of fate becomes as light as a drunken round dance. Folk and roll, as he likes to call it to escape the traps of the overused folk-rock label. And alongside “Elvis Perkins In Dearland”, the band that has been accompanying him around the world for months now, the American songwriter lends a new visceral quality to the intimacy of his debut album, “Ash Wednesday”.

Opening the evening is the tormented songwriting of Alessandro Raina, once the voice of Giardini di Mirò back in the days of “Punk… Not Diet!” and now the man behind a new project called Amor Fou. Then a solitary Elvis Perkins takes the stage armed with acoustic guitar and harmonica; the beard framing his face, the vaguely floral pattern of his shirt, the pendant and necklace standing out against his dark waistcoat: every detail seems to lend him a subtle aura of mysticism. Nerves taut, eyes half-closed behind his light-framed glasses, he launches into a stripped-down “It’s Only Me”, his voice thinning out only to cut deeper.

The band takes the stage discreetly, almost bashfully, letting the enchanted torpor of “Good Friday” float on the notes of the harmonium, amid brushstrokes of clarinet and trombone. At first, even “May Day!” seems little more than a whisper, barely sustained by a Dylan-esque harmonica; but soon drums, upright bass and electric guitar forcefully take over, driving the song toward its rowdy, roaring closing choruses. The journey has begun, and drummer Nicholas Kinsey straps on a bass drum, throwing himself headlong into the unreleased “Hey”, pounding the skins with irresistible fervour.

The songs from “Ash Wednesday”, from “Emile’s Vietnam In The Sky” to “Moon Woman II”, gain depth and energy thanks to the warm pulse of the upright bass and the dense sprawl of organ and keyboards. The title track thus takes on an air of mysterious inevitability, while keyboardist Wyndham Boylan-Garnett leans over the bellows of the harmonium to draw out a soft veil of half-light; Elvis Perkins' voice tackles, in a quivering surge, the intimate suffering of 9/11, with a disarmed gaze reminiscent of Jonathan Safran Foer's in “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”: “each day is Ash Wednesday / all this life is Ash Wednesday”.

For “While You Were Sleeping”, greeted enthusiastically by the crowd from the very first arpeggios, Perkins remains alone on stage as the other band members join him one by one, taking up their instruments over the course of the song, following the same script already tested a few months earlier during the band's brilliant television appearance on David Letterman's show.

But it's above all the vigorous reworking of “All The Night Without Love” that makes the studio version pale by comparison: credit once again goes to the drive of bass drum and percussion, which lend a driving Balkan feel to the melody pouring from Perkins' voice, somewhere between Beirut and Okkervil River.

“I've never really worried about repeating something that's already been said or done, even though, like everyone, I work with ancient forms trying to make them fresh; I just try to let the spirit or energy filter through in a way that belongs to me”: as if to give substance to these words, Elvis Perkins takes a nineteenth-century folk song, “Weeping Pilgrim” (also included by Natalie Merchant on her album “The House Carpenter’s Daughter”), and turns it into a western ride worthy of The Decemberists, with a guitar unleashing skittering runs and bassist Brigham Brough swapping the upright bass for electric bass. “I’m a poor mourning pilgrim bound for Canaan land”, Perkins proclaims, like someone who knows well what it means to walk the pilgrim's road.

The new songs performed during the evening add even brighter shades to the palette of “Ash Wednesday”, from the Caribbean-scented, Sixties-style ballad “Your Setting Sun” to the solemn organ of the stunning “Shampoo”.

For the grand finale, Perkins and his cohorts save the rousing revelry of "Doomsday," with Kinsey and his bass drum at center stage, egging on the crowd (small but engaged) at the former Transilvania with wild eyes, while the blare of a funeral-band trombone accompanies the fervor of Elvis's voice.

One thing's for sure: "Ash Wednesday" only partly expressed Elvis Perkins's potential. And that's no coincidence, since at the time the album was recorded, the partnership with the Dearland hadn't yet come to be. A road full of promise now opens up before the American songwriter: it's time to set aside the dramas of his past and turn his gaze toward the future that awaits him.

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