Concert Review: Joe Pug – Tuning Fork, November 25, 2019

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Joe Pug brought his The Flood In Color tour to Tuning Fork last night, where the singer-songwriter of remarkable lyrical depth refused to let a damaged voice weaken his beautifully simplistic, hour-long set.

Last night’s performance at Auckland’s Tuning Fork felt like a fitting reflection of Joe Pug’s new album, The Flood In Color, with both the opening and headlining act occupying the venue for just over two hours. Pug’s new album features a collection of brief, lyrically concentrated songs, with only one number breaking the three-minute mark.

Opening for Joe Pug was Lindon Puffin, who arrived on stage with his acoustic guitar, harmonica, and the mismatched swagger of a whiskey-swilling rockabilly transplanted to a craft-beer open-mic night. Puffin has a remarkable voice and brilliant command of the harmonica, both of which he immediately put on display from the opening number of his set, Send in the Drones.

His simple acoustic riffs complemented the complex harmonica of Maybe the Truth, with high, sharp-stringed chord transitions captivating the crowd early on as Puffin warmed himself up to the performance on stage between songs. Puffin’s lyrics – and conversations with the crowd – swirled into observational comedy at times, which felt mostly charming yet dangerously close to growing repetitive; Puffin leaves little mystery to his performance, both as an entertainer and a musician.

The half-hour set built nicely in the sunset-drenched feel of Rest Assured, where he displayed more of his high-energy and highly impressive harmonica and vocal clarity, and finally felt like we were seeing a more genuine side of the musician – not just performing songs and reciting lyrics, but letting go and embracing his role as an authentic singer-songwriter on stage.

Puffin reached a climax of poetic expression with Sing Song, which embodied the angst of a yearning musician through relatable, local lyrics, and a cover of Bob Dylan’s Jokerman, committing fully to the emotion of the performance and demonstrating his range on the harmonica. A quite ambitious crowd-participation of warbled whistling in his closing number seemed to encapsulate Puffin’s set, which would have benefited from a little more restraint and knowing when to dial back the intensity and longevity of his performance.

Shortly following Puffin, Joe Pug took everything of the previous act and showed a complementary, refined display of musical and lyrical talent across his hour-long set. Opening with Hymn #35, Pug’s stunning, restrained control of the harmonica was a magical way to begin the second half of the evening, where his rich, soulful voice carried through into The Letdown and title track, The Flood In Color.

Pug performed two numbers – I Do My Father’s Drugs and the closing Deep Dark Wells – fully acoustic without any amplification, which I’ll admit felt slightly off, and perhaps only worked as well as they did due to the less-than-capacity crowd at the venue. Pug mentioned a few times during his set that he had recently fallen ill and his voice wasn’t as stellar as he hoped, an admission which was only obvious by the slightly flattened, muted sound of these two performances.

However, even against his remarkably clean guitar and beatific, soul-wrenching harmonica coupling, it is lyrics where Pug shines the brightest, with Nation of Heat, Blues Came Down, and the soul-slicing gut-punch of Exit all illustrating a heavy dose of Dylan with the eternal beauty of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and grimy realism of Raymond Carver’s Fires:

‘We got the loudest explosions you ever heard / We got two dollar soldiers and ten dollar words’
‘They say that truth and justice / Must be their own reward / I grew rich pretending while the honest all went poor’
 ‘I will find you in the arms of yet another / I will find you in her medicated eyes / No God is cruel enough / To pay me back in kind’

A two-song transition to the keys for Veteran Fighter and The Great Despiser displayed Pug’s natural ability to fluidly move between instruments while capturing the same, exquisitely simple tone of the earlier set, with momentary flourishes of harmonica showing the musician pushing himself beyond the physical limitations of his energy to present the crowd with a memorable reason for venturing out on a Monday night.

Just like The Flood In Color album itself, both Pug’s performance and that of Puffin felt distilled to an almost immutable level of restrained perfection; it was, as Pug mentioned to the crowd halfway through his set in an introduction to Low-Hanging Fruit, a performance where nothing added or subtracted could have improved it – where happiness was not another place but this place, and not another hour, but this hour.

~Oxford Lamoureaux

Click any image from the galleries below to see a full set of images by Chris Zwaagdyk

Joe Pug

Lindon Puffin

Joe Pug Setlist

Hymn #35
The Letdown
The Flood In Color
After Curfew
Nation of Heat
Blues Came Down
I Do My Father’s Drugs
Low-Hanging Fruit (A Perfect Song)
If Still It Can’t Be Found
I Don’t Work in a Bank
Exit
Hymn #101
Veteran Fighter
The Great Despiser
Deep Dark Wells

Oxford Lamoureaux
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