Music / Reviews
Review: Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Bristol Beacon – ‘In perfection was a lack of engagement’
There’s excitement in the foyer of the Beacon – and rightly so: Jason Isbell is one of the greatest songwriters working in America right now.
His latest record, Weathervanes, won Best Americana Album at the 2024 Grammies, following two previous wins for 2016’s Something More Than Free and 2018’s The Nashville Sound.
The new album is a beautiful collection of southern folk tales for the modern era, dealing with everything from toxic masculinity to opioid addiction to mass school shootings.
is needed now More than ever
We live in a time where World War III seems ever on the horizon, whether that’s from the constant hammering of the 24-hour news cycle or from doom scrolling for even just a few minutes.
But Isbell wasn’t all fire and brimstone tonight. He seemed happy to be in Bristol, and honoured to play in a room as majestic as the Beacon Hall. When they got going, the band appeared to have fun together – flinging guitar picks and roaming around the stage.
At multiple points throughout the evening, Isbell and guitarist Sadler Vaden duelled off against each other, shredding back and forth like a honky tonk Iron Maiden.
They played at least half of the new album, running through note-perfect renditions of Death Wish, Save the World and King of Oklahoma, a tearful sendup of America’s opioid crisis and the ruins of a life gone hideously wrong.
So many of Isbell’s characters are people who’ve been let down by an underfunded social system, who’ve been lied to by those who were supposed care for them, who’ve been dropped off a cliff with no safety net awaiting them at the bottom.
Support act S.G. Goodman gave us a bit more to smile about, pairing her beatific vocals and masterful playing with fun quips between songs.
This was something missing from Isbell’s presentation. The man is an incredible songwriter. He can rip it up over the fretboard and sing as if he has his own personal choir in his back pocket. But in that perfection was a lack of engagement tonight.
Cheers popped when they played Super 8 (“If I ever get back to Bristol…”), but otherwise it was as if they were playing to us from behind a velvet rope. Isbell’s songs speak for every working person who has ever struggled in their life, and so connecting with the audience, some of whom would’ve found it a stretch to buy a ticket in the first place, will always create a warmer environment.
It was telling in fact that, by the end of the show, Isbell’s hair looked pretty much the same as when they’d started.
Isbell and band are a well-turned out bunch – photo: Jason Isbell
Some of the lyrics hit hard tonight. Perhaps it’s the impending doom of another Trump presidency – this time supercharged with ultra-right-wing fascism.
“Shit’s about to get real,” Isbell sings on Save the World. “Everybody dies, but you gotta find a reason to carry on,” he sings on Death Wish. And, “In the name of survival, we get used to this,” on Miles, before ending with a sublime encore of Cast Iron Skillet.
Even the stage design – a backdrop of ruffled cloth, lit in the colours of the Gold Rush, the Great Plains and of a blood-red volcanic rock – felt meaningful. Though Isbell’s songs tackle stories of a personal nature, it’s their universality that makes it impossible not to transpose onto the fate of the United States – and, really, the rest of us, too.
Isbell drew out many tears tonight, both for the beauty of his music and for what the next four years have in store. How bad’s it gonna get? Will we ever see him again?
Who knows, but watching Isbell and his band at work tonight, there was gratitude in the air for witnessing a perfection that we can only hope and pray will one day return to us.
Main image: Rich Kemp
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