Kathleen Edwards, on
her Twitter profile, vehemently declines to "choose between Bryan Adams and Ryan Adams", and her brand of wistful Americana sounds like the sort of elegiac, veritably autumnal evensong that the lovechild of the two singer-songwriters would humbly cobble together, were genetic engineering capable of fusing together the creative genes of two males and what have you. The Apollo is tonight buzzing and although Edwards is playing second fiddle to Justin Vernon (at one point quite literally as she dishes out doleful scrapes of violin), there's ample evidence to suggest it may well one day be her name set against the glaring signage stuck to the venue's exterior that tonight reads 'Bon Iver'. Wading through heaving stairwells, corridors and open halls, tonight's crowd is a peculiar, quite non-representative cross-section of indie culture as those in jet-black hoodies and shredded drainpipes natter away with the suited, booted, and those in bootcuts. Edwards meanwhile is, in fashion aesthetic, something of a hybrid, decked out in jeans that hug her shins like polar creatures grasping onto the odd sporadic tree dotted about Wapusk National Park and a lumberjack-like shirt. And yet given the idolisation of Vernon around these parts right around now, it seems as though any awe is reserved for he and he only. One somewhat guileless attendee expects his soundcheck in place of Edwards' set, before swiftly affirming: "She's banging." "She" later praises the Brits' tendency to do or say whatever they want, whenever they want and the latter, the more verbal end of this tendency, patently becomes a problem tonight as a quite sublime Change The Sheets is reeled off atop the constant drone of murmuring. She's later forced into a false-start, so overwhelming does it dishearteningly become as the general ambivalence of a crowd that you'd have thought would adore, or at least admire such melancholy hits fever pitch. Persistently prattling on throughout, the local chatterer later lambasts suicide as a purely egotistical act and names his greatest talent (the ability to cut his own hair as nondescriptly as imaginable) and as inescapable, if intriguing this eavesdropping may be, Edwards is equally compelling.
Despite bewilderingly conceding she has "nothing interesting to say", it's evidently an incorrect affirmation: she's toured far and wide with Vernon, whose live show finally seems to add some much thirsted for reason to the idiosyncratically odd rhymes of his eponymous sophomore record, while her lyrics tell tales of indulging in the inadvisable combo of margaritas and sleeping pills. She waxes lyrical on London, a debauched locale in her starry eyes where she's enjoyed "a few beers. And a few hangovers. I've had some sex here", this brazen confession greeted with the most audible audience-based whooping of the show. Backed delicately by just two guitarists, they first saunter through the desolate, yet dreamy
Wapusk (apt atmosphere contributed by the icicle-like chandeliers that dangle from the walls of the Apollo), although it's an initially barely recognisable rendition of Sidecar that startles and stuns almost into paralysed submission. Although the stage is littered with two drumkits, neither are at this point in time manned, and as such the once-racy track is decelerated, its message of highway unity laid bare atop wavering bass frequencies unleashed from a scarcely fondled keyboard. The gangly Gibson twangs and blues licks of Run reaffirm that Edwards is at her best when pushing the tempo, although the wraithlike soothe of Goodnight, California, displacing the air of speech to fill this vast expanse, is almost unfeasibly otherworldly. She closes with the slightly unremarkable Empty Threat, making way for an anxiously, agitatedly, and above all petulantly awaited main attraction although for those that opened their ears in place of their mouths, something quite irresistible just wafted on by.
