Natalie Merchant @ The Helix, Dublin – 01/06/2010
June 10, 2010 No CommentsMLM head down to Dublin to check out Natalie Merchant‘s academic method of showcasing her new album, ‘Leave Your Sleep’ – perhaps similar to Duke Special’s current tour, which we’ll be reviewing in style next week.
Ever since her earliest days fronting American indie-folk bohemians 10,000 Maniacs in the 1980s, Natalie Merchant’s bookish nature has always been balanced with her ever expanding musicality and distinctive vocals. As a solo artist for just over 15 years now, with an impressive but scant output, such gifts are to be called on immediately this evening in Dublin. As part of a tour promoting her current double album, ‘Leave Your Sleep’ (a six year long project marrying Merchant’s own progression into motherhood and a collection of 19th and early 20th century children’s poems and nursery rhymes) tonight is as much a presentation as it is a concert.
While reaction has been lukewarm in some quarters to the undeniably insightful slideshow that assists Merchant (at times, lengthy anecdotes about the writers within the songs), the Dublin audience is willing, admittedly nervously, to allow Merchant the space to indulge in this most unconventional of performances.
Detractors have accused Merchant of assuming the role of teacher or lecturer on this tour, while others, quite rightly, would suggest that she is merely giving credit where credit is due, and tonight we learn things we never knew about.
We learn of child poet Nathalia Crane’s later-in-life association with the ‘troubles’ in Belfast and Derry and are treated to a series of Mother Goose illustrations, with one, as Merchant correctly points out, bearing a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. The songs pull on a gamut of emotion, as Charles E Carryl’s ‘The Sleepy Giant’ and Edward Estlin Cummings’ ‘Maggie and Milly and Molly and May’, are performed with a witty touch of tongue-in-cheek drama by Merchant, standing in sharp contrast to the Native American struggle of ‘Indian Names’ by 19th century poet Lydia Huntley Sigourney.
Merchant slowly blossoms as the set progresses, and is soon swooning around the stage with a trademark theatrical looseness that not even the minimal backing of two acoustic guitars and a cello can dilute. The 90-minute foray into her ‘Leave Your Sleep’ collection is pre-dominantly slow-paced but nevertheless thoroughly engaging, as is Merchant’s voice, which increasingly commanding with age, breathes fresh life into the poems, rhymes and writers glaring down on her from the screen above.
The extended encore of solo classics like ‘Carnival’, ‘Break Your Heart’, a poignant ‘Motherland’ and an emotionally charged pairing of ‘River’ and ‘Tell Yourself’ may appear to be an olive branch to an audience who stuck it out with her this evening, reinforced by the celebratory sing-along nature of show closer ‘Kind and Generous’, which has the Helix on its feet, but regardless of this glorious finale, Merchant owes no apology for the hour and a half journey through her latest album.
It’s undoubtedly an ambitious live show that she is touring at the moment, and in the hands of someone else it would probably fail. Even her refusal to delve into the 10,000 Maniacs catalogue fails to dampen the spirits of this Dublin audience, who are thankfully willing to welcome the theatrical sense of ‘edu-tainment’ she has brought to the stage this evening.
By Mickey Ferry