” Said you can’t find no water “, began Tuesday evening the Coloradian Nathaniel Rateliff by singing the words of shoe boot. Water, you say?
Posted at 12:00 a.m.
Before the concert, hundreds of open umbrellas in front of the big stage tried to block the fleet, then the wetness, then the fleet again.
From the first notes of Night Sweats, a collective grafted to Rateliff as a dilettante since 2013, the little fabric roofs were folded up in their case. So much for the rain! Groove obliges, the water would come anyway through the pores of the skin.
“I’m gonna leave it all out there to dry”, the soul-rocker will immediately reassure us about You Worry Mealso taken from Tearing at the Seams (2018), second album created with the seven Denver musicians.
PHOTO SARAH MONGEAU-BIRKETT, THE PRESS
Nathaniel Rateliff
“I’m delighted to be back in Montreal! I missed you, ”launched the all-black headliner, in front of a crowd that would have seen double in good weather.
It took four songs for the octet to dive into its newest material, The Futurewith I’m on Your Sideclosely followed by the energetic and well-brassed Survivor. This enfilade sums up an opus concerned – and dismayed – by global divisions and human vulnerability, but not without some glimmers of hope.
Often welded to his guitar, Rateliff migrated to the keyboard to A Little Honey, as simple as it is groovy. ” I need you baby / More than you’ll ever, ever know / Oh, yeah. He stayed there for the love ballad Love Me Until I’m Gonebefore getting up to sing without an instrument Face Down in the Moment. The inhabited and nasal voice of Rateliff exhibited its most beautiful nuances.
The 43-year-old singer-songwriter is neither talkative – a few delicate “Thank you” and “I love you” in the local language punctuated the concert – nor a showman, but he defends his rock and Americana heirs with poise and conviction.
S.O.B.
Many festival-goers have undoubtedly entered the warm home of the Night Sweats through the door of SOB, adopted by American animator Jimmy Fallon, then by FM radio in 2015.
It was during the encore, after having delivered the groaning title track of The Futurewhich Rateliff rewarded the festival-goers with his “unwinding” anthem: “ Son of a bitch / Give me a drink “. Joy of live, this time it was without a “beep” of radio censorship to hide the ubiquitous “word beginning with a b”.
PHOTO SARAH MONGEAU-BIRKETT, THE PRESS
Many people came to attend the Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats concert.
Under soulful and playful clothes, the singer evokes his galleys after breaking up with the bottle. It is besides the alcoholism which was going to kill, three years later, his producer and friend Richard Swift. A crucial loss in the creation ofAnd It’s Still Alright (2020), solo album almost invisible by the pandemic. Rateliff dropped the touching title track on Tuesday, with guitarist Luke Mossman as his only accompanist. ” I’ll be damned if this old man don’t / Start to count on his losses / But it’s still alright. »
“We must continue to have hope and to try to understand each other,” Rateliff had implored by way of introduction.
For many festival-goers, the big concert on Tuesday evening was an opportunity to confirm that Nathaniel Rateliff is not the man of a single song or a single album. Throughout his entire discography, the singer from Colorado skilfully hybridizes the genres dear to the 1950s – Southern soul, R&B, gospel – and the literate folk-rock of inspirations such as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.
Trumpet, saxophones, guitars (especially electric), percussion: it’s a solid wall of sound that the Night Sweats moved on Tuesday evening. Was it raining? To see him sweat and dance to the cross-hatched rhythm of Need Never Get Old, this couple in the crowd didn’t care. ” Taking our time / Ah just standing in the rain “, returned the speakers.