Photosets: Night One, Night Two

The combined setlist from both nights (not in order of performance):

Belief
Bigger Than My Body
Clarity
Dreaming With A Broken Heart
Good Love Is On The Way
Gravity
I Don’t Need No Doctor (Ray Charles cover)
I Don’t Trust Myself (With Loving You)
I’m Gonna Find Another You
In Repair
No Such Thing
Slow Dancing in a Burning Room
Stop This Train
The Heart Of Life
Vultures
Waiting On The World To Change
Why Georgia
Your Body Is A Wonderland

Rob Bell is the founding pastor of a church called Mars Hill in Grandville, Michigan. The subtitle of his book, “Repainting the Christian Faith,” is a perfect synopsis of its aim – to present a Christianity for the 21st century: a flexible, all-encompassing church that allows worship while understanding and embracing the realities of modern life.

My relationship with this book very nearly ended before it had really begun, when I came very close to throwing it across the room in disgust. On page 19, Bell is discussing the nature of belief systems. The offending line is one often regurgitated by people of faith who don’t have a real understanding of what faith is.

“An atheist is a person of tremendous faith.”

Bell needs to buy himself a dictionary. Faith is “belief that is not based on proof.” This isn’t a question of a “difference of opinion” or “two ways of looking at the issue.” Bell is simply wrong. An atheist believes there is no God because of a lack of evidence, a Christian believes there is a God despite a lack of evidence. Atheism is not a faith-based position.

Despite it falling at the first stumbling block, I decided to press on with the book. Bell is clearly trying to come across as a hip guy, but all too often he stumbles into being condescending. He writes in very short sentences. Like this.

And very often he has paragraphs consisiting of just one line.

As if every sentence has to be a soundbite.

Catchy and and easy to digest.

The hidden subtext seems to be that he regards his audience as idiots who can’t process long, complicated and interesting sentences and so must be drip-fed small snippets of information so as not to confuse their delicate little brains.

Standing side-by-side with condescension is hypocrisy, and like many people who claim to offer their “take” on a religion, Bell provides this in spades. He spends the entire first chapter attacking “traditional” Christians who claim their literal interpretation of the Bible is correct and those who don’t follow it will certainly rot in hell. He laughs at their “bizarre leap of logic” and finds it hard to accept that they could possibly be serious in believing these preposterous things.

He then spends the rest of the book putting across his own more liberal interpretation of scripture, constantly referring to his “realisations of truth” and making it clear that he is right and the rest of the human race is wrong. But how can he not see that his position is exactly equivalent to that of the fundamentalist? They are both reading the same Bible, but have come up with different interpretations of its contents. Neither has any evidence that his position is correct. Neither is “right” or “wrong”, they both simply have an opinion, each of which is as valid (or invalid) as the other.

The book is not without merit. “Movement 5″ of the book, entitled Dust, is a fascinating history of the first century world in which Jesus (may have) lived, and how the Jewish faith he was a part of worked at that time.

In general, it is extremely difficult to form any vitriol towards Bell (notwithstanding the exception noted above) in the same way that fundamentalists can so easily generate rage in their perversions of science and bizarre moral positions. His religion is one of peace (”Shalom”) and generosity, and he rallies again the churches which are run for profit, both financial and moral (in people desperate for attention for every good deed they perform). He passionately believes in protecting the environment. He says that acts of selflessness and generosity should be “underground” and stealthy, never selfishly asking for any praise.

Rather than anger, the overwhelming feeling that remains after finishing this book is one of sadness. Rob Bell opens his curtains in a morning and looks out on the world, and sees the same sky and the same landscape and the same diversity of life as the rest of us, but he sees it through the lens of God. He sees God’s hand in every part of nature and human existence and morality, and he believes that he feels a greater sense of beauty and fulfilment through these experiences of God.

But that beauty and wonder is accessible to everyone, whether religious or not, and believing that it is anything other than part of a natural process diminishes it greatly. Seeing God wherever you look in the world diminishes the greatest wonder of all – the very fact that we, as a part of billions of years of continual sculpting by natural selection, are able to experience all this beauty at all. We are conscious and curious beings living in a vast universe of mystery which we can explore and begin to understand, and that must surely be the most humbling and breathtaking thought it is possible to have. God removes that mystery by filling it with a meaningless dead-end explanation. Bell’s book about understanding the “real” Christianity has got nothing on the “real” world.

I took a video of “Please Don’t Tell Her”, which I’ve uploaded to YouTube here.

The support band were Anathema, a Liverpool band who sound like a cross between A Perfect Circle and Vex Red, with a bit of doomy metal thrown in as well. Rather good.

Porcupine Tree were stunning. They played quite a lot from their new album “Deadwing” as well as a couple of tracks from “Up The Downstair” (which is going to be re-released in a few months) and a mixture of other old stuff. Highlights for me were “Blackest Eyes”, “Trains” and “Lazarus”. Definately worth checking out if you like your music intelligent and proggy, but with loads of melody to boot.

Enigma is set at Bletchley Park, the centre of British code-breaking during World War II. It manages to convincingly weave together a love story, a spy story and a wartime epic without falling into the usual trap of mindless patriotism, or (worse) twisting the story to allow the Americans to save the day. Thoroughly enjoyable.

I feel I should say a bit about their guitarist, Guthrie Govan. I saw him perform solo at Music Live in Birmingham last year, and he was fairly stunning, but seeing him perform a full set tonight really showed off just how good he is. He is a master of all styles, can shred faster than just about anyone and has a perfect sense of rhythm. Vitally, every note he plays adds something to the song, he never resorts to mindless widdling and he always “says” something with what he is playing. Definately one to watch.

The venue is fantastic – a fairly small hall with the best acoustics I have ever heard for a gig – perfect reproduction of the natural sound of the guitars, crisp and balanced and with very little of the boomy reverb you normally experience in anything larger than the tiniest venue.

First up was Martin Carthy, who played a short set of folk tunes and a song from a film. His style is technical in its chord forms and picking patterns, but simple in its sound and melody, and perfectly suited to the music he plays, and his powerful and controlled voice is the definition of English folk music. Martin Taylor played next – an amazingly talented jazz player who can make his guitar sound like a full orchestra. He even made it sound like a steel band at one point. He did a stunning version of “Don’t Know Why” – the song that was made famous by Norah Jones.

Juan Martin was another change in mood and genre, playing very complex and technical flamenco music on his nylon-strung acoustic. His ability to play staggeringly fast flurries of notes but still pick out the melody of the tune impressed me the most about his performance. He was followed by Martin Simpson, who plays bluesy folk music and also threw in a Bob Dylan song. He started with a gorgeous slide guitar piece and played three or four others before inviting the rest of the players back to the stage.

The final part of the show consisted of all four Martins playing together. Initially it sounded a little crowded, but that was because I had been used to listening to solo players all night. I had been very interested to see how the different playing styles of the four guitarists could be made to work together. I quickly acclimatised to the sound and it became obvious that it really did work – rhythmic folk music with flamenco fills and jazz licks played over the top (or varying combinations of these) made a sound unlike anything else. These are four players who are used to performing solo and having to play the parts of a full band on their own. Put them together, and you have a band who all play the same instrument, but are capable of switching between the roles of the rhythm guitar player, lead guitar player, bassist and drummer at will, several times during each song. It’s an amazing sight to watch, and the players clearly enjoyed performing it as much as the audience enjoyed watching.

Overall, this was certainly the best guitar-centric gig I have seen, and I’m already looking forward to watching the Four Martins DVD I bought at the show!

Most important is the songwriting. Kamelot can write songs which are extremely heavy in parts, beautiful and mournful in others, fast and gallopy or slow and thoughtful. They write huge, catchy choruses without resorting to cheese. They effortlessly keep eight-minutes songs interesting all the way through. It’s definately a prog influence (they sometimes sound uncannily like Dream Theater) but crucially they have adopted what’s important from their prog influences – the song structures and melodies – which many bands miss in their efforts to sound like their heroes.

The Black Halo is undoubtedly their strongest album yet, but I didn’t pick that up on first listen. I was waiting for a “Forever” or “Centre of the Universe” – a catchy pop song which provides a handle to allow you to get your head around the rest of the album. You won’t find that here. What you will find is an album completely full of fantastic songs, all of which are equally clever and interesting. By the third listen I was converted. The production is stunning, the band all sound at their best and tighter than ever. The lyrics are beyond the standard “dungeons and dragons” rubbish of much of the genre – real human issues are addressed and discussed in an intelligent way. The guitar work is impeccable, with one catchy riff after another sprinkled with tasteful, melodic solos.

It is very difficult to pick up standout tracks because there are so many good ones, but the title track is probably the most impressive melodically and “Abandoned” is a lovely ballad which provides a break situated as it is in the middle of the tracklist. Overall, Kamelot have taken an oversaturated and bloated genre from Europe, streamlined it to remove the rubbish, added the best of their own influences and created one of the albums of the year.