For her big headlining tour, singer-songwriter S.G. Goodman, whose music combines Southern gothic, indie confession, and art rock, set up recorded ambient music beds. The “transition tracks,” as she called them, were to play keep the sonic groove going between songs as she and her four-piece band shifted from one song to another, largely from her latest album, Planting by the Signs.
It was meant to create seamless atmospherics between her arresting, slow-burning songs. Also: “They keep me from talking.” But early on in her show at the Atlantis in DC, she had her keyboardist cut the tracks off. Goodman, who is equally entertaining as a droll raconteur, knew what she had to say would last longer than interstitial music.
She only had a few of these spoken segments. In the first, she admitted she was going to play a lot from the new album. In another, she tried to follow up on instructions for the disposable cameras she had distributed before the show in an effort to get some authentic, non-digital, visual record of her tour from the very fans in her audience for a promotional zine her record distribution company was doing to get attention for her latest work.
She also spoke about the stark contrast she was finding (and everyone in the audience knew) between the “hellhole” descriptions of cities like DC that her mother feared, and the quite opposite actuality.
As amusing as these digressions were, told in her deadpan Western Kentucky twang, her songs were even better. In “Snapping Turtle,” she said of scattering “low-down” kids who were beating on a turtle for no reason before falling into a reverie about her rural past, as small towns were “where my mind gets stuck.” She recalled a childhood friend who remained in one of those tiny outposts, who would only get as far as Paris, Tennessee, and whose “life beat down like that snapping turtle day.”
Goodman’s songs bristle with specific descriptions and kernels of insight, often embedded within a keening melody or mesmerizing repetition. “Who’ll put the fire out?” she asks over and over in “Fire Sign.” In “Michael Told Me,” an elegy to a close friend begins with the repeated “Heard ‘I love you’ from Los Angeles” and ends with “Michael told me we could handle it” a half dozen times.
The rural, real-life evocative lyrics recall the best of Lucinda Williams, while her voice soars with the echoes of the Appalachian past. At the same time, she’s open to more mystical possibilities, as in her paen to planting when the moon’s right, on “Planting by the Signs,” or her wild ode to love “Nature’s Child,” a song that’s a duet with Bonnie “Prince” Billy on the record, with vocals filled in by her guitarist Gusti Escalante.
Heaven and hell are a concern, too, as they might be every day in the Bible Belt, like it or not. So her swampy “I Can Hear the Devil” was paired with “Heaven Song,” a surrealist fever dream to her dead dog, to end the 10-song main set.
She returned for a couple more songs, starting with her terrific all-timer “Space and Time,” one of two songs from her first album that she played (and nothing from her second). She followed with an even bigger surprise, a cover of the Butthole Surfers’ “Pepper” meant to stress her punk roots. But while the choice was interesting, the delivery was one of the rare misses of the night, whispering (and eventually tripping) on that song’s spoken rap, and failing to drive home the chorus.
But it was a fine show overall, made nicer by a strong set from the opening band, Fust from Durham, NC, that sweetened its stomping Southern rock with the fiddle of Libby Rodenbough.
