Jeffrey Lewis and the Voltage + Search Results
Workmans Club
May 2 2023
It is a glorious May evening compared to previous weeks leaving the comfort of home and going out in wind and rain but tonight I wanted to see what seemed like an old friend in Jeffrey Lewis. Disclaimer, he’s not my friend – we haven’t met, it just seems that way through his music.
But first Dublin 3 piece Search Results are manoevring their way around the stage. They make a racket and have been rightly lauded previously in these pages.
Jeffrey Lewis seems to re-invent himself every few weeks never mind few years. He has brought his anti folk and given it a sprinkle of psychedelia. His latest venture is with The Voltage. His last trip to Dublin was with the Jrams but he is probably best known as singer songwriter playing acoustic folk punk gems that contains a lot of words. But the words are wise and clever. Tonight those clever words contained songs from many eras of his back catalog along with the Crass song End Result (from his album of covers of the anarcho punk activists), the AC/DC track High Voltage (which pleased pretty much everyone in the crowd bar me), alongside a slide show with stories of the Great Gatsby, The Fall of the Soviet Union and “everyone’s favourite movie” The Evil Dead 2 all accompanied by illustrations from his comic books. It was a Tuesday evening, the rain had stopped and we were ready for some sun to shine in our hearts.
Jeffrey Lewis brought some joy tonight but as he finished tonight in his completely understated way “Meh, I guess it could be worse” we left the venue smiling ruefully and our lives happier with Jeffrey singing songs to us the day after Mayday.
niallhope
