Tonight’s headline act, the Muscle Shoals born but now Nashville-based Hannah Aldridge, was making no-less than her fourth visit to Lincolnshire’s premier Americana venue, The Town Hall at Kirton in Lindsey, having most recently headlined the Garden Festival in 2022. This current visit is part of a European tour that throughout the summer has already seen Aldridge perform in Denmark, Holland, Sweden, Norway and Spain before arriving in the UK for a string of dates helping to promote the ten year anniversary of the release of her debut album “Razor Wire”, which had been re-imagined and re-released earlier this year. During this tour she has been performing as a duo with the support of Melbourne-born Katie Bates supplying electric and bass guitar along with backing vocals as well opening the evening’s proceedings with a half hour set of mostly her own material. Aldridge and Bates had been introduced to each other through mutual friend and collaborator Lachlan Bryan, who along with Damian Cararella had produced Aldridge’s most recent album “Dream Of America”, in 2023.
Bates’ opening set comprised of six songs, of which half were taken from her EP “Until The Day Dies” that first saw the light of day back in 2021, receiving a positive review in these pages at the time of it’s release. From that EP, the edgy and wonderfully titled ‘Self Proclaimed People Pleaser’ got the ball rolling with Bates accompanying herself on electric guitar with just the right level of distortion to support the slightly acerbic lyrical narrative. This was followed with what appeared to be a newer number entitled ‘Every Word You Said’ before returning to more familiar territory with ‘Still Have A Home’, a tale of the loneliness of life on the road. The one cover version in Bates’ short set saw Aldridge join her on stage where together they delivered a stunning version of Gregory Alan Isakov’s ‘If I Go, I’m Going’ that immediately drew attention to how well their voices work in tandem. Aldridge then left the stage to allow Bates to complete her set, firstly with the title track of her EP, before finishing with what appeared to be another relatively new number ‘Everything Will Be Alright’ that again managed to embody both a warm americana vibe against an edgy indie rock undertone that draws favourable comparison to P.J. Harvey. On this evidence, the quality of the new material and the enthusiastic audience response it shouldn’t be long before Bates is headlining her own tour.
Taking to the stage for the first of two sets that would make up the evening’s performance, Aldridge got proceedings underway by immediately revisiting her debut album with ‘You Ain’t Worth The Fight’. Armed simply with an acoustic guitar and her powerful vocals she instantly captured all the angst and hard-earned wisdom compressed with-in the songs vivid narrative. The recent re-release of the album has allowed Aldridge to re-imagine and rearrange the running order that, collectively, has breathed new life into the songs that suggests a new vitality that is evident even in a live setting. Of course in the recording studio Aldridge’s songs have always benefitted from the full band arrangement, embracing a distinct indie rock flavour that at times reveal her love for such iconic bands as Audioslave and The Smashing Pumpkins. However, there has never been any doubt that, with such strong melodies and potent poetry, her songs would be just at home in a more stripped back acoustic setting. Bates who was still on hand, though now in a supporting role, would throughout the show continuously swap between, offering jagged guitar lines from her electric guitar that helped to tease the tension from each track, to underpinning the melody with her bass playing, giving evidence to her burgeoning talent as an all-round musician.
Throughout the first set Aldridge would revisit “Razor Wire” twice more with ‘Lie Like You Love Me’, a co-write with Randall Clay that includes the classic line “I miss you like morphine straight to my veins”, and ‘Black And White’, a song inspired by her son Jackson who was just seven at the time of writing. Elsewhere there was a scattering of songs from Aldridge’s back catalogue that included a wonderful rendition of ‘Living On Lonely’, that originally appeared on the 2017 release “Gold Rush”, along with tracks from her most recent album “Dream Of America”, in particular the provocative ‘Beautiful Oblivion’ with Aldridge delivering the most achingly gorgeous vocals, along with ‘Portrait Of The Artist As A Middle Aged Man’, a song originally written by the aforementioned Lachlan, but which Aldridge has rearranged lyrically, very much making the song her own and already becoming a highlight of her live shows.
Carrying on after the obligatory interval break that allowed the congregation to recharge their glasses, avail themselves from the merchandise stand, and chat to both Aldridge and Bates, the second set got underway with the song ‘Born To Be Broken’, a song that had first been recorded as part of an unreleased album that pre-dated her debut. Though many of the songs from that period did eventually appear on her debut “Razor Wire”, this track missed out, so it’s great to see the song resurrected in a live setting. The following song also suffered the same fate. As a co-write with her father, renowned Muscle Shoals musician Walt Aldridge, and James LeBlanc, father of Dylan, the track ‘Yankee Bank’, has now been rightfully restored to the new re-imagined version of the album. Here again the song worked perfectly in the stripped-back acoustic setting, with Bates adding some delightful backing vocals, which to be fair she had done throughout the evening’s two sets.
The following number was the only cover version of the night, and a song that when it appeared on last year’s “Dream Of America”, rather split opinion with both critics and fans alike. ‘Psycho Killer’ was the first hit single back in 1977 for American new wave rock band Talking Heads with its ominous lyrics that represented the thoughts of a serial killer and its driving baseline, provide testament to Aldridge’s passion for a driving beat mixed with the dark lyrical exposure of society’s underbelly. Even here, in this acoustic setting the song loses none of its propulsion or intensity with Bates excelling on bass.
It felt only right that the evening’s performance included a stripped-back version of ‘Razor Wire’, as the album celebrates its tenth year. A song with its strong narrative of hard times and hard decision that first announced Aldridge on the songwriter’s scene, with a keen eye and a poet’s heart, it was delivered here with all the passion and verve as if she’d written the song only yesterday. The title track to her sophomore album “Gold Rush”, followed, a song she co-wrote with Ashley McBride that deals with the struggles of growing up in a broken world. The next number ‘The Fall’ was also a co-write, this time with Ben Glover, that used the biblical tale of the ‘Walls Of Babylon’, to address the heartbreak of an irreparable relationship. Originally recorded with Glover as a duet, Bates stepped forward to share vocal duties on what was truly one of the highlights among the evening’s many. Here Aldridge’s vocal delivery, not for the first time, conjures up echoes of Gretchen Peters at her darkest and most intimate, though this comparison is not so surprising when you consider that Glover is also a regular co-writer with the 2015 inductee to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Another co-write with McBride followed on ‘Lace’ that has Aldridge’s vocal delivery ranging from the seductive, with the lines “I like my whiskey like I like my men, on the tip of my tongue”, to the possessed, “hold me like a heathen”, as the song builds from an intimate love song to the manic intensity of two musicians creating a frenzied fusion of truly metallic proportions. That rock theme was continued into the closing number with the perennial crowd-pleasing ‘Burning Down Birmingham’, complete with a sing-along chorus lifting the the roof of the town hall. Rarely has this stage rocked so hard or harnessed such feminine power than it did on this evening performance.
Needless to say the almost capacity audience were never going to let such a high level of entertainment come to an end just yet, and after a tumultuous round of applause their demand for an encore was rewarded with Aldridge returning to the stage, and for the first time tonight alone, to perform the fan-requested ‘Parchman’. The song, inspired by a woman from Mississippi on death row for murdering her abusive husband, might have at first seemed a strange number to close the proceedings with its sombre narrative, and yet in truth, much of Aldridge’s poetry is dark, but as always, it is delivered with equal levels of empathy and emotion that pulls the listener in close, never failing to make the connection. Tonight Aldridge proved, if indeed proof was needed, that whether her songs are administered by a full electric band or as an acoustic duet, their power and grace, intensity, and sincerity never fail to deliver.
Wonderful live review!