Ben Gilde
Laurelthirst
Public House
2958 NE Glisan St., 232-1504.
9 pm Wednesday, April 12.
Cover.
Ben Gilde comes from the Northwest. You can tell.
Gilde's spare songs give him away even as they give off
a definite, damp chill. He can evoke Revolver's most
dire moments or feedback-free Velvet Underground. More to
the point, he summons the cold grit and edge Gus Van Sant
captured in Drugstore Cowboy. Gilde's musical vocabulary
is the language of the pre-latte Northwest, the non-dot-com
Northwest, lumberjack-shirted Northwest, a region lousy
with people on the run. He sings about cold coffee, cold
oceans, cold trees.
So where else could he be from?
"I grew up as a population statistic in Salem," explains
Gilde, now 29 and preparing to pitch a lovely (if icy) self-released
CD called Close to the Bone. He says his dad had
a decent ear for classical and his mom sang in the car.
He took piano lessons, first from a martinet who demanded
posture and sight-reading, then from a hippie into improv.
Later, he played guitar in a high-school basement band.
Gilde split for college in Eugene ("I studied English--poverty
and unemployment, basically"), hung out for a couple of
years, pulled a stint in an Alaska cannery for the cash,
moved to Portland and started playing shows.
It's an old story, but Gilde clearly harvested all he could
from it, as Close to the Bone's deep-rooted, wintry
feel shows.
"I was actually thinking about calling the album Winter
Branches," Gilde says. "A lot of the songs were written
during the winter, and most were recorded over the winter.
For 'Billie's Bringin' Me Down,' it was literally winter,
raining, Monday, about midnight, and I was sitting at home
getting drunk and listening to Billie Holiday."
Was he trying to turn out an echt N-Dub album, or
what?
"It was never my intent, but I don't have any other imagery
to draw on since the only time I've ever lived anywhere
else is two or three months in Alaska," he says. "So I guess
it is. I know there are a lot of other singers around Portland
who tend to be a little spooky. Must be something going
on."
You could connect the dots between Gilde and Elliott Smith,
for example, another troub marinated in Portland rain who
lays out treats for folkies, rockers and pop fans alike.
Gilde himself says he identifies with independence-minded
local songwriters like Kaitlyn ni Donovan and Kelly Joe
Phelps.
"Portland is a great place to be a musician, because there's
not pressure from a huge marketing machine," Gilde says.
"People have the opportunity to explore and invent new kinds
of music rather than just respond to what they're told they
need to be a part of."
In fact, Gilde's own music testifies more to long hermetic
hours with a guitar and a four-track than to loyalty to
a particular musical clique here or elsewhere. His ode to
alcohol and Billie Holiday lilts with a tasteful jazz touch.
Other songs prove he's listened to traditional folk of all
kinds. The last track even unfolds into an exit jam that
sounds like Led Zep coming down off a long night out.
While he strays into lyric cliché every now and
then, overall Gilde stakes this record to its own patch
of soggy ground. Like a highly adapted animal, it matches
its environment perfectly. It'll be interesting to see how
it plays in the wide world, where Gilde says he'll take
it--after a while.
"When the weather turns shitty again," he says, "I'm probably
gonna go on tour."
Perfect.
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 12,
2000
|
