Gig review: Phosphorescent at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds

Matthew Houck of Phosphorescent.Matthew Houck of Phosphorescent.
Matthew Houck of Phosphorescent.
Matthew Houck’s two-set performance makes for an evening of inspired, captivating music.

“This will be a long evening of bummer songs,” Matthew Houck announces only half-jokingly to the sold-out Brudenell during the early stages of tonight’s generously portioned, two-set performance, before playing the tune that the Nashville-based songwriter operating under the Phosphorescent banner considers to be the saddest of the offerings he has planned for the evening, The World Is Ending.

In fact, this typically luminescent slice of immaculate downheartedness (off new album Revelator, and written by Houck’s partner Jo Schornikow) is very much on par with the general glass-half-empty tenor of the back catalogue Houck has amassed since launching Phosphorescent in 2001.

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Although Phosphorescent is musically also inclined towards psych-rock and a certain brand of low-lit widescreen Americana, Houck’s songwriterly roots are wedged in deep in the rarely overtly cheery terrain of country music. When Houck covers a tune he declares to be one of his favourite songs in the world, it’s Any Old Miracle, a beautifully crafted, textbook classic country song by Vern Gosdin.

Later on, Houck and his musical companions deliver a startlingly beautiful take on country standard Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain, with the desert-dry directness of Willie Nelson’s legendary rendition catapulted towards the stars.

The evening’s proceedings start with an eight-song solo set drawn largely from the earliest Phosphorescent records. Houck’s voice feels frail and road-worn, with some higher notes in the melodies left unbothered, but the cracklier tones are perfectly suited for the folk narrative stylings of My Dove, My Lamb (off 2007’s Pride).

The heartfelt pleas of Endless (off 2005’s Aw Come Aw Wry, and according to Houck one of the early Phosphorescent songs he’s recently re-recorded for a new film by Paul Schrader) gradually build into a dense mesh of multi-tracked voices ricocheting off each other.

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It's a hugely compelling slice of controlled cacophony, but really only just a warm-up for the mesmerising full band set.

The first moments of the longer second set find Houck and the four-piece band feeling their way onto the same musical page, but by the title track of the new album (the first Phosphorescent album in six years) the musicians have reached a rare level of telepathic interplay, with the typical multi-layered sheen and studio polish of Phosphorescent’s more recent albums exchanged for gritty ‘cosmic Americana’ vibrancy centred on the haunted wailing of a pedal steel.

The resulting expansive sound is in delicious contrast with both the stark minimalism of the earlier solo set, and the introspective meditativeness that tends to be the default setting of Houck’s songs.

Beautifully forlorn songs like Tell Me Baby (Have You Had Enough) start off faithful to the original script, before venturing into muscular, sizzling jams that reach an almost levitational level of propulsion, and find the touring pedal steel player and keyboardist (who slips into bouts of energized headbanging during the most high octane moments) exchanging beautifully realised, loose but never self-indulgent solos.

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By the time the extended, enthusiastically received evening of thoroughly inspired, captivating music culminates with an epic, steadily ever-intensifying cruise through the incantations of Dead Heart, you wish that Houck followed up his obvious delight in the glorious noise this band is delivering by making the next Phosphorescent album with this exact line-up of musicians.

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