On an evening when a vast number of people were paying equally vast sums of money to see Taylor Swift on a first night in Gelsenkirchen there was a modest crowd of 1500 to see Larkin Poe (on a double bill with Rival Sons) rock the stage at Kunst!Rasen on a hot Summers day. Money and crowds though are not the measure of quality as the Lovell sisters from Georgia proved – and then some!
For the uninitiated, The original Larkin Poe was great, great, great grandfather of the girls onstage tonight – and a cousin of celebrated horror writer Edgar Allen. I’m sure the great man would appreciate the ‘Memento Mori’ tattoo on Rebecca’s right arm. Clearly, family history matters to the girls, and that attention extends across to their music. Respect Tradition doesn’t mean playing songs as if they were museum pieces though, and possibility Larkin Poe’s greatest accomplishment is to sound authentic but also modern in a genre heaped in tradition.
I last saw Larkin Poe at Luxor in Cologne six years ago. It was one of those lucky bookings by a small venue that secures a top act literally as that very week the band’s ‘Venom & Faith’ disc had gone to #1 on the Billboard Blues Chart. At the time I forecast huge success, and certainly, the Band have gone on to play bigger venues. Along the way their albums have become, dare I say it, a little slicker. More polished. The same might also be said of the Lovell sisters visually. When they take the stage I notice what seems a more stylized approach in the hair, clothes and make-up departments. Rebecca seems to change guitar after every song now. Her staple ‘Buttermilk’ guitar has also had a makeover. Megan has dropped her famed Rickenbacker lap slide in favour of a custom-made signature model from luthier Paul Beard that apparently has half the weight and all the volume of her old Rickenbacker.
That description of the new lap slide holds true this evening, and musically I’m glad to say there are no great changes. It’s a short set of 75 minutes, exactly the length of set allocated later to Rival Sons, although I personally would have had the sisters as the main attraction. Straight away there’s a homage to a musical hero with the instrumental ‘Jessica’ made famous by the Allman Brothers (and via being the theme to BBC’s ‘Top Gear’). It’s a good number to warm up to, before we dive into the girl’s own music where ‘Kick The Blues’ is sets the stall for what’s expected with its lyrics exhorting the audience to “Get up, shake your moneymaker… and kick the blues!”
Possibly my favourite LP number is up next – ‘Preachin’ Blues’ a composition bursting with glorious gospel swagger. It also makes me realise that Rebecca Lovell has a very underestimated powerful vocal. She doesn’t smash through any huge tonal registers, but she does get the max out of what she’s got. There are numbers evoking home: Blue Ridge Mountains and Southern Comfort. There is also a brand new song ‘Bluephoria’, so fresh that it’s getting its first live airing here in Germany.
Every top band should have a slow, big ballad number in their set and for Larkin Poe it’s the number ‘Might as well be me’ That voice I spoke of earlier gets a chance to shine on this one. Despite the shortness, there is also time for favourite LP live tracks in tonight’s set. Rebecca dedicates one of these to all the women in the audience – the song ‘She’s a self-made Man’. Following the new track ‘Bluephoria’ we hear ‘Bleach Blonde’ from 2018’s ‘Venom & Faith’ disc which punches along beautifully too, but if you want to see the band completely rock out you will need to wait for the closing ‘Wanted Woman/ACDC’.
I rather missed the close, hot and sweaty atmosphere of that 2018 Luxor show, but there’s no going back. Larkin Poe proved on Friday night that you don’t need glitzy outfits and a hundred background dancers to make great music. Come back soon ladies!
