When: 7.30pm on Monday 14 March 2011
Where: The Deaf Institute, 135 Grosvenor Street, Manchester M1 7HE
*** PLEASE NOTE: Death Vessel’s European tour is cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. Refunds available from outlets ***
We’re pleased to be bringing Sub Pop/ATP artist Death Vessel to Manchester for his first headline show here. He’s previously toured with Low and José González in Europe, and has just supported Jónsi around America.
Death Vessel‘s latest album, Nothing Is Precious Enough For Us, exudes a unique ambition wider in scope than most of its peers. The musical reach is fully extended – deep into the past, grounded in the present and nodding to the future. Owing to the gritty avarice of Joel Thibodeau’s singular spirit, voice and musicality, the songs – though rooted in a more traditional feel of folk and early Americana – sound as progressive, experimental and modern as they do antique and old-world. In fact, his hyper-tuneful and wholly spellbinding melodies seem to owe as much to 1960s pop, rock and jazz as they do to bluegrass, old-time or country. The music is haunting and spiritual, mysterious and kind, ageless and contemporary, soulful and psychedelic. In short, it’s where the requiem meets rock ‘n’ roll.
Joel moved from Boston to Providence in 1998, later spending a few years in Brooklyn around 2004 before settling back down in the outskirts of Providence last year. In the mid-1990s, Joel and his brother Alec formed String Builder—a musical partnership that would produce several albums and a few singles. As that came to an end, Joel began writing songs under the name Death Vessel, working closely with Erik Carlson, whose songwriting input and unique guitar tonality helped shape the band’s early sound. Death Vessel’s debut album Stay Close was released in 2005 to critical acclaim.
Nothing Is Precious Enough For Us was recorded with longtime producer/collaborator Pete Donnelly (The Figgs) at his New Jersey studio, and various locales across the northeast with no steady band. Joel himself plays acoustic, electric and steel guitar, as well as drums, harmonica, mandolin, percussion and keyboard parts, inviting a revolving door of friends and players to fill things out. But the core and heart of the music belongs to Joel. His latticework foundation of acoustic finger-picking, paired with his unexpectedly high, peaked vocals, alternately keening, carousing and utterly captivating, is more than enough to sustain and propel this record to an otherworldly exuberance. In fact, for the past few years Joel has toured primarily as a solo performer, and the songs are inarguably mesmerising and relevant in that setting.
‘Death Vessel’s label-mates are the likes of Fleet Foxes and Iron & Wine, and both are useful reference points for a band who straddle the stranger areas of nu-folk and the most conservative sounds of Americana. In fact, Death Vessel’s musical range is far broader, but the voice fools you into thinking you’re listening to something from the world of Devendra Banhart or Joanna Newsom, when the band are delivering much more’ – The Sunday Times, four stars, album of the week
We’re excited to have Rozi Plain as support for this show. The Bristol-based artist, a regular Manchester headliner in her own right, released her debut album Inside Over Here on Fence Records in 2008.
*** PLEASE NOTE: Death Vessel’s European tour is cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. Refunds available from outlets***