Live music listings: May 2008

Doors 7.00
£10.00 via Ticketweb and WeGotTickets
£12 door

Chatham County Line was spawned at Raleigh, NC’s infamous Blue House on the corner of Hillsborough and Boylan, when Dave met high-school friends Chandler Holt and John Teer. A long-standing crash pad for Raleigh bands like Corrosion of Conformity, the house had been the scene of sunrise jam sessions for years. The kind of place where a joint was always being passed and there was always a beer to be found in the back corner of the filthy fridge. The sort of house where it wasn’t clear who actually lived there and who was just hanging out fighting off a hangover, or working on the next one. Touring bands from Athens to D.C. knew about the house and its open door policy, exercising the standing invitation when the previous night’s draw wasn’t quite up to snuff down the street at The Brewery, or over in Chapel Hill at The Local 506. The ancient wooden floors showed the scuffs and scars of a decade of house parties and loose, drunken jam sessions.

But that year, the soft pine planks would take the brunt of an especially enthusiastic flatpicker’s stomp. That picker’s name? Dave Wilson.

Four albums later, 'IV' marks a watermark in Chatham County Line’s creative arc. “On this album I wrote a lot of the songs in a very different way from how I have written on other records,” offers Dave in reference to a loose jam session-style process. Wilson’s basement served as a rehearsal space for him and Tift Merritt band members Zeke Hutchins and Jay Brown to experiment between CCL tours. “They’re not in CCL but they’re good friends and helped me develop some of my ideas for this album. I would play something and Zeke and Jay would give it a groove.” A unique approach when writing songs for a band with no drummer like CCL. “On many of the tunes the mandolin does the work of the drummer. And I like the idea of the listener being the drummer, whether it be stomping your foot or tapping on the steering wheel.”

It’s clear that morphing rhythm-based songs for the instruments in CCL is responsible for much of the album’s unique mood. Songs like the slurring Stonesy romp 'Let It Rock' and the speedy blues 'I Got Worry' give 'IV', a relaxed boozy vibe not evident on CCL’s more tightly strung previous albums. Here the tension lies solely with the searing intensity of 'Birmingham Jail'. John Teer’s usually pitch-perfect high harmonies are broken into shards in the form of a blood curdling scream. The pop structures of 'Chip of a Star' mark perhaps the band’s greatest leap to date with their first “hook-based” tune and the addition of bouncy pedal steel from bassist Greg Readling.

While rockers do abound on 'IV', it’s really the album’s ballads that act as showpieces. The flat-out gorgeous 'One More Minute' features harmonies from Whiskeytowner Caitlin Cary. 'Sweet Eviction' tells a tale of bitterness amidst a landscape of crawling, veiled gospel. Its differences and new feel aside, IV certainly doesn’t divorce itself from what fans have come to know and love as Chatham County Line. 'The Carolinian' a tight, traditional bluegrass workout might at first glance seem out of place. But Wilson doesn’t see it that way at all, “I just took the best songs and put them on the album. That’s it. End of story.”

Fade to black.

Main support Hayward Williams ' live shows have been described as having "...everything you could hope for... message, melody, and hooks" (Vital Source), and feature his facile guitar and thoughtful, distinctive tenor (imagine the honeyed side of Ryan Adams, Jay Farrar's earthy grit, the playfulness of Sam Cooke). Built on a foundation of folk, blues, and soul Hayward's songs in performance display the raw intensity common to these forms, tempered by his own easy self-possession and wry charm.

In little clubs and smoky bars around the Midwest, armed with his excellent record "Another Sailor's Dream" and his aw-shucks charisma, Hayward Williams is quietly building both a following and a career the old-fashioned way, one night at a time.

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