"The Goldilocks Effect"
Published in Berkshire Eagle, 11/12/09
Photo by Ogden Gigli
By Jeremy D. Goodwin
PITTSFIELD—Eh.There was a bit of a Goldilocks Effect at play during Luke Doucet's solo show at Mission Bar and Tapas Monday night. His area debut wasn't too warm, wasn't too cold...but rather than being just right, it just sat there in the middle somewhere.
Playing a classic-styled Gretsch White Falcon guitar, unaccompanied, Doucet did his best to rock for four. He played a bassline here, dropped the rhythm to tear off some lead lines there, and once in a great while consented to chop out a couple power cords to keep things lively. But as he darted from musical duty to musical duty, it was a sort of spinning-plates act. And an eventually unsatisfying one.
There are electric guitarists who can pull off the one-man show act very well. With less chops or nuance, Billy Bragg can cause enough ruckus to pass for a one-man The Clash. Doucet, though, rarely got much musical momentum going before breaking off to color between the lines in fine detail. Ironically, for all this detail the effect was one of going nowhere.
It didn't help that the material was starved for melody, the lyrics populated with been-there-heard-that references to alcohol, cigarettes and "the road," or that Doucet's nice-guy, middle-register singing voice rarely expressed much passion.
“First Day” told an interesting story of dislocation, and elsewhere Doucet conjured the wonderful and strangely sentimental image of a man buying two Ferris Wheel tickets—one for himself and one for his wife, due to get out of jail in a few months. But the kiss-off song “Broken One” came off as merely spiteful (“You don’t need a heart to have a swollen head/ One day you’re gonna miss me”), leading one, alas, to side with the ex-girlfriend he was trying to send up.
It wasn't a bad idea to reconfigure Bruce Springsteen's "I'm On Fire"—an ominous mumble about sexual obsession and seething guilt—into a country music arrangement, but Doucet's vanilla vocals drained the song of any heat.
The lonely instrumentation was no doubt chosen for economic, rather than artistic, reasons. Doucet is an accomplished musician with the sort of vintage sound apt to earn a fervent cult following; he has seven albums to his credit, going back to 1997. But, alas, the market doesn’t seem to bear a full-band tour for this Canadian artist at this time.
Photo by Ogden Gigli
Based on the songs available on his Web site, I’d still show up, with interest, to see him perform with his band. But in an attempt to fill in the musical parts he no doubt heard in his head, Doucet allowed the songs as well as his technique to feel rootless. Trying to identify his forte, I couldn’t tell if his voice on guitar was best suited to the rhythm parts, the occasional solos, or what. He never really gave himself a chance to stand out from any one angle. To translate his material to this form, Doucet needs do so some more editing.
On a couple well-chosen covers, the pieces came together to form a fuller picture, with the artist content to be less busy on guitar. Neil Young’s “Winterlong” was a highlight, and benefited from the backup vocals of Johnny Irion, who jumped up from his front table to sing along on the choruses. The Band’s “Ophelia” ranked as one of the few songs to come across as a rock song from start to finish.
“That’s about as hard as one person can rock,” Doucet said at one point. Perhaps more due to circumstance than any fault of his own, he was right.
On a couple well-chosen covers, the pieces came together to form a fuller picture, with the artist content to be less busy on guitar. Neil Young’s “Winterlong” was a highlight, and benefited from the backup vocals of Johnny Irion, who jumped up from his front table to sing along on the choruses. The Band’s “Ophelia” ranked as one of the few songs to come across as a rock song from start to finish.
“That’s about as hard as one person can rock,” Doucet said at one point. Perhaps more due to circumstance than any fault of his own, he was right.
