Published on October 17, 2009 in
Live Reviews •
Music “I’m in awe of you people who live in this city, paying 700 dollar a month rents. I live in fear and I pay only 300 a month,” singer Mark Redding mentions during our chat before
the Shackeltons’ set. ‘Mark, make that 700 times three,’ is my retort. Ah, if it weren’t so. Living the band life in rural Pennsylvania may be quite a different thing than our struggle to support the higher rent artistic life in NYC, but then again, we all have our crosses to bear.
The Shackeltons are an honest band. On stage, they are cathartic and visceral in a theatrical sense, but not in a faux or showy, character-driven kind of way. Watching, and better yet, feeling, their pure emotion pour out on the stage is the most real kind of theater. You get a sense that Redding and the band don’t perform in order to seek attention, but it’s just something they need to do. It’s a release for both audience and performers, after all.
Redding seems to have a nature that’s built on a kind of awareness and nurturing for those around him. He invites questions instead of passing opinions, often with mysterious leanings, both in real life and in the lyrics of the Shackeltons’ songs ["Your movement is my treasure chest."] And as Redding has said in a
past interview: “I will have to say that life in general takes courage, faith, hope, love, persistence, songs, and a good dose of humor- that is what we have in common with Ernest [Shackelton]. We don’t want to give up, and we know that this journey is definitely not all peaches and creme. But we will survive and we will have a story for our loved ones.”
The reason that their shows are still sometimes intimate, attendance-wise, is because some people don’t know what to make of their act. Perhaps all that inner self being exorcized, and all those gut-felt revelations, may cause a timid embarrassment in the minds of new spectators.
“This song goes out to all the mothers,” Redding insists at one point in the set. “If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t be here.” (Yes, we’ve heard this before, but when it’s said with as much of an intent as Redding’s, it’s as if music had not yet been invented). We danced wildly. We danced, because we had to.
–Cleo and Zabatay/photos by Kelly Starbuck