Incredibly, the woman before you in the rustling, blindingly white wedding dress, Mrs Tracee Mae Miller (flame-coloured cascade of hair; skin like a porcelain doll; sugary-breathy voice like the thought at the back of your mind), will turn out not to be the most interesting thing on stage tonight. A minute ago, her husband Dan John Miller (cheap suit, wedge haircut, voice as flat as a WANTED sign, face longer than the night your lover leaves you) was teetering on the edge of the stage like a bridge-jumper, eyes goggling; in another minute, in between leading his band through love’s-done-gone dirges and tearaway surf-guitar-serrated rampages, he will be canvassing the audience, however optimistically, for spare strings for Blanche’s overzealous lap-steel player and shamelessly calling for a Guinness for their tiny, but vicious, girl drummer (“Just put it in a baby bottle,” Tracee adds tartly).
So: sure, Blanche’s impassioned/forlorn alt.country templates aren’t new; and sure, Dan and Tracee’s coy interplay is more than a little Emmylou & Gram/Brett & Rennie/Patrick & Anna (El Diablo); and sure, the tears flow like wine and the loneliness howls through these songs like an abandoned dog and the typical body count’s up there with The Sopranos — but as with any great story, it’s not about whether we’ve heard it before, it’s about how it’s told. And Blanche’s eccentric jalopy of personalities and performers tell it brilliantly. Like when Patch Boyle, who’s spent the gig cradling his autoharp like a dead baby, suddenly bursts into tangles of dissonance, dragging the courtly, smile-and-flirt squaredance of ‘Do You Love Me’ down a dark alley; or when drummer Lisa ‘Jaybird’ Jannon (whom they drafted in when Jack White left, as if it matters) crashes her way through a surging, accelerating ‘What This Town Needs’ like a cornered outlaw; or when Tracee coos the fabulously unlikely line “I will fuck you until you die” in such a sweet, affectionate murmur we nearly miss it. Damn. You can’t take your eyes off ’em for a minute.
kim porcelli