Saturday, 2 November 2024
He was among friends, the Alter Bridge front man Myles Kennedy, here in Oslo very much on his own terms, playing to a packed John Dee. He now has three albums from which to draw material and as he pointed out in a pause in the concert, it was good for him and his band to be able to vary their set from night to night, to keep things fresh, not just for them but for the people that they know go to more than one show. There were probably a few of those in the audience.
It was a set with a good dynamic range, starting with two of the higher energy pieces from his latest record, the title track “The Art of Letting Go” and “Nothing More To Gain”. This would have got things off to a perfect start, except that the vocals were too quiet. Kennedy paused to greet the crowd – “Now, someone was saying something, over there” and the reply came “We can’t hear you.” “Okay, I’ll sing louder,” and he smiled. It was an evening full of that kind of warmth, between the members of the band who were very much in tune and between them and the audience.
They needed little prompting to join in on refrains, like on “Love Can Only Heal”, which Kennedy described as being an important work in his catalogue, but that had almost not made it onto the “Year of the Tiger” album. The audience clapped along whenever the opportunity arose. Each song was greeted with warm applause at a minimum.
It was a set with one striking absence – there were no Alter Bridge tracks on the list. The one cover was an acoustic rendition of Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper”, which was very well received, with the audience joining in both with their hands in support of Kennedy’s stomp and with most of the words.
The tracks from the new album dominated the setlist and rightly so. There isn’t a weak number among them, and while “Saving Face” felt a bit more trotted out than some of the others, Kennedy is right to feel confident enough in the new songs to make them the core of this solo tour.
There were only three musicians on stage, with the sound filled out by some supplementary keyboard pedals by bass player Tim Tournier, with Zia Uddin, a long standing collaborator of Kennedy’s and a friend of thirty years, hammering the drumkit with considerable force over the hour-and-a-half plus set. The trio delivered a polished performance, tight, sensitive, even swinging at times. While Uddin seemed more at home with the rockier pieces from the new record, he was able to slip into country and rockabilly-style playing with no difficulty. Despite these changes of tone and musical style, the set did have a unifying feel which probably came from the simplicity of the arrangements and the fact it was a trio.
However, if the sound world of the show was kept on the simpler side, barring the acoustic cover, at its midpoint was a definite shift in atmosphere into something more serious and emotionally deep, with “Behind the Veil”, which Kennedy said he thought was probably his favourite piece from the new record. This was presented as a subtle, complex piece, delivered with gravitas and a long, wandering, gradually expanding solo where each note drew in the audience more and more, as it built, not particularly increasing in speed, but in intensity. At other times in the concert, there was plenty of evidence of Kennedy’s technical skill as a guitarist, like the lightning fast solo on “Saving Face”, but it was in “Behind The Veil” that Kennedy the musician was most visible.
The set built to an appropriate climax with “In Stride” from his 2021 album “The Ides of March”, which had second highest score on the setlist, before a brief pause and the strongest piece of the new record, “Say What You Will”. It was a good humoured, positive concert, full of great atmosphere, a warm bond between artist and audience, and strong performances of a well-chosen and well-ordered set list. Some might bemoan the lack of Alter Bridge songs on the list, but for the undersigned it showed the quality of the latest material and Kennedy’s catalogue overall that he does not need to lean on that. So, we’ll say “well played”. 4.5/6
(We have interviewed Myles for the next issue of NRM magazine! Subscribe here.)
Text: Alex Maines
Photography: Anne-Marie Forker
