There is a certain amount of tie-dye in the crowd at the Forum, and – very unusually for a show not populated entirely by teens – a strong smell of weed in the air, which seems odd for a show by the latest hero of bluegrass. But then Billy Strings – William Apostol until his aunt gave him his nickname – makes bluegrass of a different kind: this is jam-band bluegrass. Hence the covers of Black Clouds by String Cheese Incident and Fearless by Pink Floyd, alongside more conventional bluegrass staples by the likes of Bill Monroe.
All that is done with no concessions to a rock band lineup, though: Strings, on guitar, is backed by an expert band of mandolin, upright bass, banjo and fiddle. There are no drums – the percussive thwump comes from the bass, and from Strings’ furious downstrokes. There are times when the band makes you think how much bluegrass has in common with technical metal: the formal structuring of some of the songs, and the reverence for high-speed shredding. And over two sets, totalling two and a half hours, you do get a lot of opportunity to listen to high-speed shredding.
It’s the willingness to detour that makes Strings so interesting, though. The second set begins with him playing guitar offstage, then wandering around the backline – this time the pace is sombre, the playing less focused on pure melody. Here, he seems to be channelling the great John Fahey rather than Floyd or Monroe.
But it is when he and his band – all from Kalamazoo, Michigan – hit full speed that the crowd respond best. There are ragged attempts at pogoing at the front, huge roars at favourite tunes. The opioid epidemic rave-up Dust in a Baggie returns bluegrass to being a chronicle of rural American lives rather than a museum piece.
For all his postmodern style-hopping, what’s attractive about Strings is his command of the vernacular of classic American rural music. That combination of keening Appalachian harmonies and the interplay of stringed instruments is a timeless sound – and one so central to so much rock that followed (these are the same harmonies as First Aid Kit, for example, employ) that’s it hard not to feel returned to some prelapsarian place of pure music.
• At the O2 Ritz, Manchester, tonight. Then touring.
