Music / Review
Review: Sam Amidon, Bristol Folk House – ‘You never know where he is going to fly off to next’
You can probably tell quite a lot about a folk gig by the audience. Some are a sea of grey hairs and sensible sweaters. Some are a bit more hipster beards and plaid shirts. The (sizeable and wildly enthusiastic) crowd for Sam Amidon were very firmly the latter. You’d almost call him the future of folk were it not for the fact that Amidon has just released his seventh album and he plays music that resolutely refuses to be squashed into a folk shaped box.
There’s a splash of Bluegrass, some straight-up Dylanesque acoustic guitar songs, tiny burps of something experimental, a beautiful hymn-like sing-along and the shimmering presence of odd-ball jazz. You never know where Amidon is going to fly off to next and that makes this evening pretty thrilling.
Amidon’s latest album is a self-titled, collection of old timey tunes. On record these have been re-worked and re-arranged, live they are much more traditional. With just two people on stage there is less scope for the harmonics and beats but the songs have a bit more space to just be themselves. With his banjo held like a machine gun, and inventive percussion courtesy of the seriously brilliant Chris Vatalaro, Amidon picks out something bluegrass-y to get your foot stomping.
Equally Blue Mountains deftly captures the whole evening perfectly. While Amidon plays his acoustic guitar, Vatalaro adds the most subtle of electronics; the beats are like the hiss of vinyl, the patter of rain, the insistent scratch of a cat and they complement perfectly.
Perhaps it’s not until the encore that one song just makes the whole thing make perfect sense. An old fiddle tune erupts into a proper hoedown and then veers off into something very, very wonky indeed. It’s discordant, noisy and sounds like strange interference from a different gig altogether. The whole evening feels as though there’s something else struggling to be heard beneath the folk songs, there’s something weird in there that wants to be free but Amidon only lets it out now and again.
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Supporting was Bristol’s own Herbal Tea, a solo bedsit strummer weaving hazy, echo-y moments with nothing more than a crystal clear guitar and a beautiful voice. Peering nervously from beneath a fringe she holds us rapt.
Sam Amidon might not be the future of folk but he might, conceivably, be the future of squiggly-free-jazz-electronic-bluegrass-nu-folk and that’s probably OK by him.
Main photo: Gavin McNamara
Read more: Review: Breabach, Bristol Folk House – ‘Bringing absolute joy from the moment they stepped on stage’
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