Arbouretum: live @ Supersonic 2009

I ran through the rain to get to the outside stage in time for Arbouretum’s evening slot, having seen them play a club show a couple of nights before. There aren’t many bands I would feel the urge to see twice in quick succession, but these Baltimore boys are worth it. They are a louder band than you might expect. Both of their recent albums, 2007’s Rites of Uncovering and this April’s Song of the Pearl (review here) are loud guitar records, but they are a band whose live persona differs subtly but importantly from the records.

Their studio work is forceful and hefty, but even turned up high it would be hard to replicate the pounding they give you when the amps are close by, which lends added gravity to Heumann’s voice and ravaged lyrics. Bass player Corey Allender is a sturdy workhorse who appears to be staring at a far off planet while keeping the bands blood flowing with the help of Daniel Franz on the drums.

Seeing them play emphasises the interlocking guitar work of Steven Strohmeier and Dave Heumann, something I hadn’t been aware of until these shows. Perhaps on record I mistook the complexity for studio effects and overdubs, because to see them pull off the spectral chiming passages and doubled-up solo’s was at times astounding. On ‘Another Hiding Place’ they joined together for the chorus’ vocal harmonies, which sounded deeper and stronger than on record. It’s a powerful song, and it clearly still resonates with its author.

The set was dogged by more than its fair share of technical problems. Both Strohmeier and Heumann broke multiple strings (see photo exhibit #19) and the heavy rain was dripping onto their pedals and monitors through a gap between the marquee and the stage roof. I wondered how they would cope when Heumann lost a D string during ‘Down by the Fall Line’, because I knew that they have been immediately bursting into ‘False Spring’ at the end of that song.

But he just went with it, and did his best to bend the strings to adjust for some wonky tuning as a result of the break. It wasn’t a patch on what they did with those two songs a couple of nights previously, but it would have left the set a disjointed mess if they had ground to halt and regrouped. It was a brave choice, made braver by the fact that they undoubtedly play Serious songs about Serious things, a hard position to fall from gracefully. A rendition of ‘Rites of Uncovering’ made me pine for another listen to the album named after it, although I love Song of the Pearl, I have to say that the breadth and breathing room on it’s predecessor makes it the better album for me. They closed with ‘The Midnight Cry’, a track that becomes one of my favourite of theirs live, when on record I’ve been known to skip past it now and then.

Later on I caught up with them and spent some time talking, Steven Strohmeier and I spoke of how Kid A changed us, an experience I recently read that Fleet Foxes mainman Robin Pecknold also went through (who’d a thunk it?). At one point Heumann and I were talking beneath a massive viaduct. I wanted to make a joke about how we were “underneath the arches”, the title of one of the bands finest songs, but I wasn’t entirely sure how he’d take it.

The two shows of theirs I saw really drove home how earnestly Heumann approaches his life through lyrics, a tendency that also arises in his conversation. It’s something I also lean towards, too often I think, but he sometimes appears as if he is carrying a burden. It led me to wonder if his skill with words (which includes delicate phrasing of an often archaic and antiquated vocabulary) has not led him to one too many existential dead-end’s as of late. He comes across like a born navigator, whose intuition is conflicting with the measurements given by his tools. Trust in words is a hard thing to break free of.

My last sight of them: In high spirits, enthusiastic and conspirational after a bout of whooping it up and putting things right at the bar…

Live Pics: