Event – Jeffrey Martin
Support – She’s In The Trees, Mike West
Date – 23rd January 2024
Venue – Future Yard
Reviewer – Alan O’Hare
Sweetheart, I ain’t your Christ.
That’s a lyric from a Josh T. Pearson song running around my head as I travel home to Liverpool underground from Birkenhead. There was a late night storm blowing around both towns and everything was moving except my mind. That was at peace as I took shelter in the soul I’d just witnessed being bared by Oregon songwriter Jeffrey Martin.
Josh T. Pearson is good ‘if you like this, try this’ shorthand for relative newcomer Martin’s broadsides and ballads – but something different is happening here, Mr. Jones.
Martin’s songs are prescient as well as personal and, in the likes of Paper Crown, The Middle and Poor Man (“I’m not a bad man, just a poor man”), his direct poetry manages to mix metaphor and meaning around melodies that seem to have been meandering around battered old Martin acoustic guitars forever.
Martin picks the strings with his nails, strums chords with his thumb and tells truths through a reverb-heavy one-man sound.
It’s an impressive mix to keep a busy room rapt on a rainy Tuesday night – requests are shouted, love is declared down the front and people thank him for coming to Birkenhead’s Future Yard, as that big old singing voice beats a cold room into submission with songs that warm the cockles of your heart.
The night was opened by the David Lynch-esque noir-sounds of the ace She’s In The Trees, before local troubadour Mike West brought his (alt) country and northern laments to life in front of an appreciative crowd.
But it is Jeffrey Martin’s simple songs of stealth and heartache that stay with me, whistling their wares into the wind as I walk out of the venue and into the wild Atlantic rain whipping in from the Irish Sea.
Review © 2024 Alan O’Hare
