Beat Root Revival
Mercury Lounge
March 28, 2024
England’s Ben Jones and Ireland’s Andrea Magee make up Beat Root Revival, an acoustic duo that combines the best of hey-ho stomp rock, country songwriting and traditional Irish and English melody-making. They rocked the hell out of Mercury Lounge last Thursday to a small, attentive crowd of 25 or 30, but they could have held the attention of a stadium. With a well-crafted and meticulously practiced set, the two used their powerhouse voices to demonstrate the very best of what a country duo can be.
You know the bodhrán? It’s a traditional Irish drum; it sounds almost like a tom drum that’s half-submerged in water. Magee plays it as an accompaniment to Ben Jones’s acoustic guitar, lending the act a flexibility that extends beyond simple percussion. The bodhrán in Magee’s hands has its own voice, a piece of the act that speaks and sings. The only way to explain it is to imagine that the drum is constantly being moved into and out of the water, the timbres constricting and releasing as the fluid presses against it.
Fluid is a good way to describe this act, encompassing Fleetwood Mac’s dynamic harmonies (as in their badass cover of “Dreams”), a stage presence that made this sparsely-populated bar feel like Madison Square Garden, and Jones’s looper pedal, which allowed him to lay down rhythm guitar (with the backing of the bodhrán) while he plucked out complex and groovy country lead in-between verses. The Fleetwood Mac influence is obvious and great; at the apex of his range, Jones sounds like Lindsey Buckingham, and Magee pulls off Stevie Nicks, and they play off of each other with a similar amount of good-natured intensity.
They’re the kind of band that you might see on a street corner and have your life changed. It’s American twang funneled through proper English sensibility and wild Irish rowdiness, with two vocalists who can belt, whisper, and most importantly, harmonize like lovers (word is out on whether or not they actually are). While Jones stayed on acoustic guitar, Magee cycled through bodhrán, two different flutes, snare drum, and acoustic guitar.
At times, they turned into a bonafide jam band, pushing the dynamics as high and low as their acoustic instruments could go. At one point, Jones started detuning his guitar during a solo, slowly winding one string down and down, until it reached a point several steps below the original key, and used the new string’s tuning to create a new solo in a new key. It could have failed completely in the hands of a lesser guitarist, but Jones managed to get the crowd screaming as he retuned the string back to its original tone.
The show was part of a fundraising effort for WoodyFest (a.k.a. the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival), which happens July 10 – 14 in Okemah to commemorate Woody’s legacy. If he could see an act like Beat Root Revival, I think Woody would be in awe at how far folk music can go, how many ideas it can encompass, how many worlds it can include. Maybe Woody does live.
Next for Z. B. Reeves: Herbie Hancock at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center, April 7
