Jason Isbell, Concorde 2, Brighton, gig review: Bleak vignettes of Southeastern American lives

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Washington Bureau Chief

Top 10 albums don’t mean what they used to, but Jason Isbell landing there in the US with Something More Than Free still startles. His fifth solo album confirms his commercial outdistancing of the fine band he was in for six years, the Drive-By Truckers, but his songs work similarly. They are bleak, defiant, sympathetic vignettes of Southeastern American lives. This first night of a UK tour feels like a novel more than a rock’n’roll show, imperceptibly sinking its hooks in with accumulated human detail, till you’re facing something true.

Isbell’s songs are more often domestic than Drive-By Truckers’ panoramas of Southern pride and infamy. Sober since 2012 (confirmed to cheers during “Cover Me Up”) and married with a new child, he homes in most effectively on the bedroom and the hospital ward. The cancer conversations of the stripped-down “Elephant” conclude, “There’s one thing that’s real clear to me/ No one dies with dignity.” But his old band’s “Never Gonna Change” lets his new one, the 400 Unit, surge with slow-burning force, and insist on dignity anyway. In support, Tulsa, Oklahoma’s John Moreland added further cracked-voice varieties of lovelorn dismay.