Gig review: Bobby Lee at Oporto, Leeds

The original late November date for tonight’s show had to be postponed after the guitarist’s car got stuck in snowy conditions on the way over from his native Sheffield. Tonight, the trio is a drummer short due to Covid.

It’s unlikely anyone feels short-changed by the duo that step on stage after strong support from Leeds band Elkyn, whose downcast and seriously pretty songs from impending debut album are in entertaining contrast with the quartet’s charmingly shambolic stage antics.

Moustache, long flowing locks, faded denim, a joss stick simmering on stage edge (to hide the smell of chips, apparently): Lee’s presentation is pure early 70s late-period hippie California, method-style. Musically, we’re more aligned with the kind of hinterlands of Louisiana where alligators chomp their jaws and both swampy mists and densely smoky grooves flow strong.

Not that Lee’s sound has any blatantly obvious forebears. There are subtle nods towards ancient folk songs, early J.J. Cale (if mainly through the primitive drum machine that provides a heartbeat to many of these unhurriedly evolving instrumentals tonight) and such gritty US six-stringers as Link Wray (and maybe a drop of the guitar artistry of Ry Cooder or fellow Sheffieldian Richard Hawley) in Lee’s insistently hypnotic instrumental compositions. The outcome brings to mind the sunburnt, hypnotically repetitive build-ups of a less heavily doom-laden and subtly sped-up Earth, with a drop of Tinariwen’s wide open spaces between the riffs.

The set opens with a bunch of hazily drifting acoustic compositions that suggests a psychedelic cowboy picking some sparsely melancholy tunes on a porch in the mythical Old West. Picking up in intensity and volume as Lee plugs in his reverb-laden electric guitar, tonight’s powerful set takes in chunks of 2020’s Shakedown in Slabtown and last year’s Origin Myths (released by fabled cult US label Tompkins Square).

Lee’s dry sense of humour is in evidence throughout: one particularly affecting offering is described as his attempt to write a traditional folk ballad as interpreted by fuzz-lords Dinosaur Jr., and a joyfully swirling new tune sports the surreal, Incredible String Band-paraphrasing title The HR Manager’s Beautiful Daughter. The only time tonight’s (Covid-enforced) more subdued set-up causes any let-up in intensity is the closing deconstruction (potentially unrecognisable to even the staunchest fan of the LA songwriter) of Warren Zevon’s Join Me in LA: it turns out a drum machine can’t cook up a gradually accelerating sweaty boogie quite as efficiently as a human drummer.