Show Review

Southern rock god Col. Bruce Hampton has a word for it: “Zambi,” a tasty descriptor (and performance ethos) for music that is in the moment, egoless, ambient and all encompassing. It’s just one of the intangibles that makes Australian guitar virtuoso John Butler such a transcendent performer.

Half of what gets him there is the rich, yet marvelously digestible country-funk he makes with his trio, and the other half is in the less-obvious edges: the blues flavors (reminiscent of such power trios as Mountain and Band of Gypsies), snappy lyrics, coarse, impassioned vocal delivery and whip-crack jams that make Butler’s comparisons to Ben Harper and other laid back roots-rockers not entirely inaccurate, but far from fair. This guy’s on his own plateau: a dreadlocked mélange of decades of breakneck, dexterous bluegrass pickers, string wizards like Leo Kottke, acid jazz architects like Jeff Beck and, with a slight nod toward psychedelic whim, hippie rockers like Trey Anastasio.

Watching Butler during his sold-out show March 12 at Boston’s Paradise, it was hard not to think back two and a half years, to the last time he played there. Butler had then just offered “Three,” a brilliantly realized, if somewhat repetitive independent, and played every song on the album, plus a back porch blues take on Sly and the Family Stone’s “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey,” to a crowd a quarter of March 12’s size, thinning more with every selection despite maintaining enough interest to sustain a few.

Indeed, it’s taken Butler a few tries to break into U.S. markets – back in Oz, his band is more popular than even indie rocker flavors of the month the Vines and Jet – but he’s definitely here now, and many of the original attendees of that 2002 Paradise date were probably in the audience this night, proud that they could recognize auspicious talent some 30 months ago while fighting to see the stage. Butler knew it, too, and said, sheepishly, “It’s been a long time since we’ve played this room. There are a lot more people.”

Both Butler’s songwriting and the range of his genre embrace have also expanded since “Three,” and over the course of the set he used a variety of guitars and volume settings to explore a range of palettes, interweaving expertly with Shannon Birchall’s crisp drum beats and the thumps, plucks and eye-poppingly badass bowing of bassist Michael Barker. Birchall and Barker have rounded out the trio since 2003, and after several lineup shifts before then, Butler’s clearly found his guys.

Butler’s 12-string with the high G string removed is still a weapon of choice, and, whether amped or acoustic, he cut mighty swaths through zipping cuts like “Pickapart,” “Funky” and “Treat Yo Mama With Respect,” searing, bluesadelic jams like “Betterman” and “What You Want” and more laid-back, ethereal fare like “Hello.” His slide chops are especially bravura, and he mixed things up with both wah-wah pedal effects and slippery, bent tone runs that would make Albert King a believer, let alone the country blues legends – Son House, Skip James, Robert Johnson – with whom Butler could hold court. He dropped a few jaws with “Ocean,” a ripping solo instrumental that found Butler attacking his 12-string with flurries of notes, runs and arpeggios, faster and faster until it exploded into a hail of tones and abruptly dropped off before any strings could break under the duress. If lightning fast picking were his only weapon, it’d be an amazing parlor trick, but Butler made the jam his set’s centerpiece, and it was genius level.

He got a bit ginchy on “Peaches and Cream” – although a lovely campfire ballad in honor of his newborn, it’s Butler at his most Jack Johnsonian – and the encore-closing “Zebra” embraced the formulaic, faux-reggae that an artist of his caliber should largely avoid (and should be left only to adept party-rocker bands in Sublime and O.A.R. vein). Still, he earns the right to mellow out every now and again; Butler’s single-handedly jolting the roots-rock genre back from the hollow, complacent wasteland for pretty boys, callow songwriting and fluffy lyrics it’s become.

For more info see: johnbutlertrio.com