Mel Parsons – Tuning Fork: June 6, 2025 (13th Floor Concert Review)
Mel Parsons led a confidently understated band on the Tuning Fork stage, her between song banter in upbeat juxtaposition to the lyrical content’s often somber and melancholy tone.
Yet there is something upbeat in her music that gives it an uplifting aspect, be it the choppy yet metronomic beat from Jed Parsons on drums, the nuanced guitar work of Josh Logan on a cream Stratocaster, or the rolling basslines of Ali Stewart – something about the band’s dynamic gave it the whole-greater-than-sum-of-parts feeling.
Opening with Offer Down, from last year’s Sabotage, she grabbed the crowd from the first bar and held them till the last note faded at the end of the show. Carry on followed, from Slow Burn album, and her acoustic guitar centered with the Gillian Welch meets Joni Mitchell vocals carried the songs along with a rustic warmth befitting their contents and lyrical messages.
Brick by Brick followed, a song from her forthcoming album released as a single last month, a happy-sad anthem to the potential of new love with the metaphor of building a house.
The melancholic atmospherics of Hoping for Rain from Sabotage again followed, drifting along in a haze reminiscent of Lucinda Williams in her ballad mode. Husky vocals and floating ethereal guitar lines, shuffling drum beat. Atmospheric, impressionistic music that could have been made in the 70s but that is no bad thing. Little Sadness off the same album has railroad folk or Americana vibes and lovely three-part harmonies and a loping slow beat like horses cantering along a plain towards the horizon. The first set was brought to a close with Driving Man and Far Away – both from the Drylands album. Parsons’ brushes gave percussive texture to the pieces without overwhelming the soundstage, and some nice fretboard work from Logan sat well on the bed of acoustic guitar, electric bass and drums.
After a short hiatus Parsons returned to the stage for Glass Heart, just her solo and sparse. A few songs into second set she kicked into the highlight of the night, the new single Post High Slide – a painting of the picture of the post show fade that occurs after any high, and the circularity of playing a song about the afterglow after a show sat well for me. Not to mention the playing on this new song was rhythmic and driving and a new direction from her past work, slightly more upbeat and refreshingly lighter. 5432 was Gillian Welch influenced nuance country pop, lush harmonies and a pretty chord sequence. This high yet poignant point was followed by an intro to Alberta Sun which she described as a song about her time planting trees in Canada- and had me thinking of Michelle Shocked at her best, swinging out of Anchorage with swinging acoustic strum and open throated chorus joy.
Just Cause ostensibly completed the more electric guitar oriented second set, were it not for the welcome encore this alone would have left me musically and lyrically satisfied. For her songs are journeys in miniature, the psychogeography of the human relationships mapped with eloquence and gritty understatement. At times verging on slightly too sweet or saccharine this pitfall was avoided by the underlying melancholy timbre her music is hewn from. The encore of Don’t Wait, a moving folk ode to doing what makes you happy, and the brevity of life and I Got the Lonely closed up the show, which all in all was thoroughly engaging and musical throughout.
Stevie Allely
