When an American beat poet from Columbus Ohio passes through
your hometown, it is rude and remiss not to lend them an ear. Even when scheduled
to play past eleven o’clock in the cellar bar of the town’s quirky left field
pub, an itch that something compulsive would surface gnawed away. In an ideal
world, forty minutes of Micah Schnabel just gets you into the mood and lays the
foundation for a greater serving of sparky folk punk poetry delivered from the
sharpest of minds and a beat up guitar clad with the slogan ‘art or die’. This
performance binned every media fuelled notion of Americana and took the term
back to its rawest form.
Micah Schnabel is best known as the front person for indie
band Two Cow Garage, but his solo work is bubbling under the surface waiting for
that breakout moment when the masses hang onto every word spun out. This
current short run of UK dates, the first as a solo artist, has spawned from an
invite to play a Frank Turner bash in London, and includes a display of artwork
from his travelling companion Vanessa Jean Speckman. The main creative artefacts
drawn from are the latest album YOUR NORMAN ROCKWELL and the sentiment from a
brand new published novel titled ‘Hello, My Name is Henry’. New songs such as
the explicit ‘I Don’t Want to Die in a
Nuclear War’ and the more subtle ‘The
Teenage Years of the 21st Century’ also joined the fray as not a
single second of the forty minutes stage time was wasted.
In a passionate haze of Kerouac meets Strummer, Schnabel smashes
the concrete floor to find material that others dare to touch and thus reveal
an underside of reality that is stark, frank and poetically expressed. Hanging
onto every word sung/spoken was far from an ordeal as a mesmeric hook coated
each composition shared. One memorable line after another tossed into the air
as a grim view of society was explored in ‘Cash
4 Gold’, the character from the novel introduced in ‘Hello, My Name is Henry’ and the joy of re-connecting with music
resonated in ‘Jazz & Cinnamon Toast
Crunch’. If you ever have songwriter’s block try asking yourself questions
as Schnabel did in ‘The Interview’
and don’t even try to visualise juggling a chainsaw in ‘Oh What a Bummer’.
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Away from the solo material, a song farmed from the Two Cow
Garage catalogue in ‘Shakespeare and Walt
Disney’ performed a fully-fledged assault on the concept of conforming
love. ‘More Drugs’ left little to the
imagination and the title track to the latest album ‘Your Norman Rockwell’ whets the appetite to delve deeper into a record
achieving more than just pricking your ears.
