At Roadrunner, Jason Isbell and his versatile band bring heat and heart
Sometimes, the ways an audience chooses to engage with the artists they love can come as a surprise, and that surprise can reveal something of the essence of the artist’s work. Take, for instance, what Thursday’s crowd for Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit at Roadrunner chose as its biggest group sing-alongs: the let’s-call-it-rousing chorus cry of “Super 8 — “Don’t wanna die in a Super 8 motel” — and throughout “If We Were Vampires,” which reminded the singer’s partner that even if they get a lifetime together, one of them will eventually end up alone again.
If Isbell’s default position was an unbitter fatalism, it resonated enough that he managed to turn it into a rallying cry. Perhaps that was why he was able to get away with a tense opener like “Death Wish,” with its anxious guitar underpinning the song. Sometimes the hard truths Isbell dished out came in soothing packages (as in the soft but determined “White Beretta” and the acoustic-guitar-and-piano “Elephant,” about a friend dying of cancer) and sometimes, as in the three-guitar survivor’s-guilt raver “When We Were Close,” the music was tough and fiery. Even dropping his defenses for the tenderness of “Cover Me Up,” it was clear they’d been up for a reason.
Isbell’s voice was an instrument ideally suited for his favored perspective. His tight country-rock tenor was filtered through a clenched delivery, and he sang like someone who’d taken a lot of hits but still came out on the side of hopefulness, barely. In other hands, the unmoored downward spiral of “King of Oklahoma” might have been an exercise in miserabilism, but Isbell’s singing let a little light in, as did his closing guitar solo that owed a bit to Neil Young while the 400 Unit made like Crazy Horse.
That song ended with Isbell rejoining the others to hammer out full chords as a single band, and the 400 Unit’s backing proved invaluable. Three songs in sequence almost imperceptibly demonstrated the band’s versatility: With its electric charge and Chad Gamble’s off-kilter drums, “Stockholm” was all swaying jolts, while “Flying Over Water” put warm guitar hits against a smoother, less chaotic backing, and acoustic guitar and accordion-enhanced “Cast Iron Skillet” was gentle and layered but with little stings throughout.
They could also simply blast, as they did on “Super 8,” Drivin’ n’ Cryin’s sharp and blazing “Honeysuckle Blue” (sung by guitarist Sadler Vaden), and the closing “This Ain’t It.” With chewy electric guitars and a drum whomp, the band was a charged whole, with Isbell’s and Vaden’s traded-off leads joining into harmony lines like the Allman Brothers Band before Isbell returned to the concerned “Baby, how’d you end up here?” refrain and the song lifted.
Opener S.G. Goodman sang in a stretched, pleading voice atop a molassesthick sound that worked equally well whether slow and airy or rowdy and rocking. It served her well in her country-noir aim of invoking ache rather than sorrow.