Charlotte Carpenter + Bryony Williams + Aaron Jackson @ Hare & Hounds, June 9th 2016

Aaron Jackson is a local lad with guitar and granite—groin vocals and at barely seventeen is far too young to be kicking up lovers’ laments inside a broken-hearted older man’s skin. Criminally self-confident and lyrically articulate we need to keep a keen on on him. He’s young, he’s hungry and he’s from Great Barr. Three ways out of that place: The A38, Lidl’s whisky or talent.

Bryony Williams and co-guitar/producer, Rob played a brief set of dreamy drone guitars with oodles of kaleidosonic effects and the occasional jus drizzle of samples. Imagine whispery woven gossamer winged ice faeries frolicking across ice-spangled fiords. Or maybe the subterranean honed slick ambient trance grooves of ‘Stargaze’. Think early Cowboy Junkies then stop thinking and just enjoy its ephemeral displacement hedonism.

Charlotte Carpenter: a prickly English Rose whose barbed-wire tangle of alt.Garage rock celebrates her DNA steeped in Americana with panache. A snappy ten-song set growled with reverb, slide and pedal-steel guitars, plus some deliciously laid-back drums. It’s mostly about love being a contrary bastard. Yeh Charlie, tell us about it.

Lyrically and atmospherically moody, Carpenter comfortably walks in parallel with the dark-side creating sepulchral songs of antagonistic landscapes and climaxing splendour. ‘Meantime’ had a kick drum intro gliding into a guitar twang riff like some sleazy wedding band playing in a tumbleweed dusty boarder town bar stuffed with Dusk Till Dawn weirdoes consummating their vows with every orifice available. Best lyric of the evening — ‘Sometimes The Blues’…can choose you/And sometimes you can choose them too.’

A hustling hussy of a performer whose counter-culture irony is so edgy she sips from a mug of tea between song intro anecdotes. She has a startling band in to the bargain which made the evening highly satisfactory. Check her out. (Interesting fact, the drummer’s tom-tom was the actual one played at The Zombies’ recording of ‘Time Of The Season’ (Abbey Road, 1967) which they played at Lunar Festival last week.

Review: John Kennedy

Photographs: Ian Dunn

About Author