Benjamin Booker

The Louisiana, Bristol | 5 September

It’s pure coincidence that the dockside venue of Benjamin Booker’s Bristol slot shares a name with the state he calls home back in America, but as soon as he burrowed his way through the crowd and on to the stage of The Louisiana, it was clear that he’d brought something of the south with him. Walking on to the warming sound of old New Orleans jazz as the lights switched from sterile blue to an amber glow, the atmosphere of the room was special before he played a note.

Booker plays a brand of rag-tag blues-cum-punk rock that sits somewhere between the Walkmen and Howlin’ Wolf, via fellow Rough Trade signees The Strange Boys. His music inhabits the liminal space between old and new, soaking up the heritage of his Louisiana surroundings then rinsing them out, transforming them in the process with some scrappy, playful innovations.

The set-up only really makes sense when he’s singing. The microphone failed him in the opening moments of the show, leaving his mouth moving impotently while the three-piece rumbled on alone. When it finally kicked in, the interlude highlighted the paramount importance of his voice to the show. Despite the decoration of a mandolin and fiddle which appear sporadically throughout, it’s his husky tone that forms the show’s undisputed centrepiece, even beneath the roaring distortion. Indeed, the night’s most engaging moments fall when he pulls the audience in close, dropping his eyes and letting us wallow in his mellifluous, aching tone.

With Spoon Out My Eyeballs he delivered a slow, swaggering ballad, holding the moment and leaving the audience in suspended animation before letting his Riviera loose amidst the rumbling toms of drummer Max Norton. Though this and other extended noisy thrashing sessions teeter on the edge of self-indulgence, Booker’s is a wall of sound you don’t mind banging your head against for a while.

Despite the impression given by his cynical lyrics about radio chart music and computers, Booker is no luddite, and the nostalgic sound isn’t reactionary or conservative. When performed live it becomes clear that the energy is too frenetic for that, particularly on album highlight Violent Shiver, a song which bursts to life like it’s waking from a bad dream. Booker’s is blues for millennials and punk for post-modernists. Admittedly, it’s nothing new, but who needs novelty when you’ve got timelessness?

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Words: Francis Blagburn