{"id":59734,"date":"2025-04-29T08:33:08","date_gmt":"2025-04-29T08:33:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/59734\/"},"modified":"2025-04-29T08:33:08","modified_gmt":"2025-04-29T08:33:08","slug":"adrianne-lenker-live-at-revolution-hall-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/59734\/","title":{"rendered":"Adrianne Lenker: Live at Revolution Hall Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shortly after Adrianne Lenker<\/a>\u2019s arrival onstage at Portland\u2019s Revolution Hall, the audience\u2019s anticipatory silence turns giddy, breaking into warm laughter that wafts across the room like a rustling breeze. \u201cSome really good giggles going on,\u201d she says winkingly. \u201cAll I did is walk on.\u201d Recorded over three nights and brimming with 43 tracks, Live at Revolution Hall is stitched through with such intimate moments. Surrounding live performances are soundchecks, joyous greetings from attendees, appearances from Lenker\u2019s dog Oso, and sentimental exchanges with friends. In one snippet, Lenker begins plucking \u201cNow Westlin Winds,\u201d a ballad by Scottish folk singer Dick Gaughan based on Robert Burns\u2019 \u201cComposed in August,\u201d on her guitar. She declares she can\u2019t sing it, then proceeds to recite each verse in full, raising her voice at one point to compete with a motorcycle\u2019s hapless roar. The result is a vivid archive not just of time but also of space\u2014the ephemera orbiting any formal live performance.<\/p>\n

Space has become a growing fixture in Lenker\u2019s music, in both her work as the clear-eyed lodestar of the folk rock band Big Thief<\/a> and as a solo artist. She recorded 2020\u2019s songs\/instrumentals<\/a> straight to tape in a remote western Massachusetts cabin because it reminded her<\/a> of \u201cthe inside of an acoustic guitar.\u201d A similar process followed for 2024\u2019s Bright Future<\/a>, where a coterie of collaborators joined her in chasing each song\u2019s unfolding in an atmosphere of immediacy. (Two of them, alt-R&B artist Nick Hakim<\/a> and violinist Josefin Runsteen, accompany Lenker for the majority of Live at Revolution Hall.) In the celestial body of Lenker\u2019s music, songs are flickering instances rather than any kind of fixed point.<\/p>\n

On Live at Revolution Hall, Lenker partnered with her long-time friend and collaborator, Andrew Sarlo, who refracts those three Portland nights through three different recording formats. Operating as a modern-day Alan Lomax<\/a>, Sarlo used a handheld cassette recorder, a four-channel cassette recorder, and a reel-to-reel tape machine to move listeners around: from soundcheck to live performance, from back of the hall to front, from private moments to public ones. \u201cpromise is a pendulum,\u201d off Big Thief\u2019s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You<\/a>, begins at practice, crackling with lo-fi atmosphere as though Lenker were in the 1920s auditioning for Ralph Peer<\/a>, then suddenly, seamlessly, gives way to the saturated live version\u2014all luminous color. The most beguiling of these transitions occurs on \u201canything,\u201d which shifts four times, widening the view to encapsulate the audience\u2019s sing-along, then narrowing it to focus Lenker\u2019s voice, and finally landing at what sounds like the back of the room where the song echoes at a hazy distance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shortly after Adrianne Lenker\u2019s arrival onstage at Portland\u2019s Revolution Hall, the audience\u2019s anticipatory silence turns giddy, breaking into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59735,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[31104,77,269,16,15,4715],"class_list":{"0":"post-59734","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-web"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114420331497810719","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}