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Live review: Heartless Bastards
‘It’s been a while/since my face has cracked a smile,’ Erika Wennerstrom sang early in Heartless Bastards’ 3 p.m. ACL set. It’s a typical sentiment for this Austin band, which specializes in Wennerstrom’s embrace of misery — she’s heartbroken, not heartless.
This is music all about limits — the limits of love, the limits of Wennerstrom’s singing (she likes to hit the top of her range and then let her voice give out an expressive croak), the limits of her songwriting (great riffs, great lyrics, but a melodic sensibility that rivals John Lee Hooker’s one-chord songs for narrowness) and the limits of her band’s interest in rocking (they play plenty loud and tough, but rarely go for any forward momentum).
If that sounds like criticism, it isn’t, really — or, perhaps, only provisionally. There’s something thrilling about hearing this band scrabble against its limits on songs like ‘Done Got Old’ and the title track to its new album, ‘The Mountain.’ Sometimes they even pushed past them; ‘Gray’ (which Wennerstrom introduced as an ‘oldie’ from the band’s first album, 2005’s ‘Stairs and Elevators’) and the penultimate song (wish I knew the title) rocked in a way these folks (Wennerstrom and her drummer and bassist, along with a second guitarist who seems to be a new[ish?] member of the band) rarely shoot for.
Needless to say, by the time Wennerstrom thanked the large crowd who had gathered around the Dell stage for showing up, her face had cracked a big, big smile.
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Permalink | | Categories: ACL 2009: Sunday, ACL Festival 2009
