Arbouretum – Jam, Brighton
Small Brighton crowd gathers to enjoy rootsy, lumbering show by Arbouretum
Words Ben Graham
Photography Greg Neate
Arbouretum are appropriately named. Tall and fulsome of facial foliage, the four-piece sway gently upon the low stage like a grove of ancient oaks stirred by a powerful north wind. Bowed low over their instruments, they don’t move around much, and they certainly aren’t chatty. But beneath their shady bower, guitar lines twine together like roots burrowing deep into loamy soil, extending and sub-dividing endlessly towards some mythic, primal core.
Playing before a disappointing turnout of about 30 curious souls, Arbouretum draw exclusively upon their most recent album, The Gathering, for tonight’s set. Though the odd older number wouldn’t have gone amiss (the band have three previous LPs to pick from), the line-up changes the band have undergone since 2009’s Song Of The Pearl probably decided the set for them, most obviously as former second guitarist Steve Strohmeier has been replaced by Matthew Pierce on keyboards. So the guitar duels of yore are replaced by a more spacious sound, with Pierce mostly providing a low-key, atmospheric bed for singer-guitarist Dave Heumann’s semi-improvisatory workouts on ‘The White Bird’, or the elegiac, apocalyptic ‘Destroying To Save’ with its ominous refrain, “Let’s go inside before it starts to rain.”
The reshuffle works, trading the fiery dynamics of two lead guitars for a more focussed, hypnotic performance, following a single musical thread exhaustively through all possible permutations. Simple minor-key melodies take on the resonances of pagan hymns, as on the churning, cement mixer groove of ‘Waxed Crescents’ carried by Brian Carey’s rumbling drum patterns and Corey Allender’s fat fuzz bass more than compensating for the team being a guitar down. Heumann cuts through the swamp like a backwoods Richard Thompson, fusing folk, droning psychedelic rock and even a touch of Tinariwen’s Tuareg desert blues in his snaking, modal solos.
The encore is their version of Jimmy Webb’s ‘The Highwayman’, its lyrical theme of reincarnation appropriate to a band so rooted in folk rock tradition and Greil Marcus’s “old, weird America”, yet who are more concerned with reinvention and furthering the lineage than purveying a perfect simulacrum of times past. Along with semi-kindred spirits like Wooden Shjips, Citay and the UK’s Wolf People, Arbouretum are not so much revivalists as carriers of some essential spirit; links in a chain. No one would deny that their roots run deep, but their branches follow their own route to the sky.
