About a hundred and thirty people gathered for the dark opening chords of one Mirel Wagner, an Ethiopian-Finnish singer of growing repute, in anticipation of a form of sparse doom-laden blues that has no immediate place in the current categories of popular music. While in the global press Wagner's work has been compared broadly to some of the most mysterious figures of blues history – most apt in the form of a faceless 1930s legend, Geeshie Wiley – Wagner's attention to dark themes is in much greater relief against her minimal guitar work than could ever be expected from a traditional blues singer. In short, Wagner's blistering lyrics sound possessed by the blues form, not haunted by their memory.
Settled awkwardly into her chair mid-stage,
Wagner wore a casual denim shirt that belied the heaviness of the content she
was about to unleash. Opening with “The Road” - a title invoking memories of
the Cormac McCarthy classic of dark Americana – Wagner immediately set herself
apart as a master narrator. Moving with the same sort of languid and lethal
tension that characterizes a Faulkner novel or a Flannery O'Connor short, “The
Road” finds a dead man's widow between seasons of the heart. Wagner quickly
maintained course with her second song, “Despair,” the titular subject painted
as a monstrous form “riding on the crest of a black wave... standing with its
jaws wide open.” Delicious imagery in the shadows of the Hog's Back.
Assuming the strictly immobile, intensified
stare of her stage performances, Wagner settled into a set comprised of “Red”
(an erotic siren song to the devil), “Joe” (a country death song from beyond
the grave), “No Hands” (“I've been told it's one of my happier songs,” joked
Wagner in a rare moment of levity), and, finally, “No Death.” A love song of
the strangest sort, “No Death” plots necrophilia and love with a singular
geography.
Surprisingly, despite the weight of themes
utilized by Wagner (not to mention the crushing sonics in contest from an
adjacent stage housing Matthew Good), her expert rendering of songs culled
exclusively from a recently released self-titled debut charmed a cohort of
listeners that increased to nearly two hundred by mid-set. Couples – perhaps
oblivious to the lyrical horrors – swayed
together in the light wind. Babies actually gurgled and managed first
steps in the grass while Wagner dipped into a Billie Holiday-esque low range in
a final volley of “Who Am I To Sing A Love Song,” “Dream,” and “To The Bone,”
when Wagner's dark serenade (“O my little one/ this is how it's done/ you'll
play your part/ and I'll play mine”) slowly drifted away into the autumnal
ether.
- Cormac Rea
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