Doug MacLeod - Exactly Like This
Doug MacLeod is a man who understands that performance is the cornerstone of music. He gets the fact that no matter what studio trickery is involved, what instruments are played and all the other ephemera that other musicians obsess over means nothing if a song isn’t delivered with soul, commitment and honesty. It was a fact that was made clear on his last album and it’s reinforced here on his latest release, Exactly Like This. What’s even better is that he has a team around him that understand this fact just as well as Doug himself.
This album is a performance, it’s people, playing together in a room, captured in as natural and detailed a way as possible. It puts you right there, front and centre for a private and personal gig. Close your eyes and be transported to a frozen moment in time, a hi-res photograph in audio form, that has you right there in the room, right down to the creaking chairs. It’s an amazing effect, and all the more impressive for the fact that we live in a world where a CD is more often about the production that the performance.
Of course, none of this beautiful recording matters if the songs are less than perfect. Thankfully that’s something you don’t have to worry about here, Doug is a storyteller par excellence, a weaver of tales, a singer who tells you a tale and makes it so that you are there in the moment, that you understand, and that you feel exactly what he intends. If it’s from the point of view a musician on the bar circuit on Ain’t Enough or the hard luck love story of Find Your Right Mind, you understand the what, the where and the why of the piece. Even when Doug nods to an influence, as on the John Lee Hooker-esque Vanetta, he’s still being true to himself and to the song.
This is as honest a record as you’re likely to hear, a microcosm of one of Doug’s gigs, with the storytelling and improvisational playing to the fore. Doug states in the liner notes that the album is called Exactly Like This because that’s what he says at the start of a tune at his gigs. He doesn’t like people saying a song will go “Something like this,” before playing, so he changed it up and made it his own. It’s also a statement on the fact that this is the only time that these songs will exist in this exact form, each time he plays a gig he’ll change things up and play it how he feels it. It’s hard to imagine any of these songs getting any better, each is as near to perfect in execution as I could ask, enough roughness to be human, but the only way you’ll hear them this way is to get the album.
There are parallels that can be drawn here, with Hooker, with Muddy Waters’ Folk Singer, Buddy Guy’s Blues Singer, and unusually with Dolly Parton at Glastonbury (the bass player here quotes Yackety Sax, the Benny Hill theme, in a solo, just as Dolly played it at the festival). I drew similar comparisons when I reviewed his last album, and for the same reasons (apart from the Dolly). They’re all examples of beautifully recorded acoustic music by definitive performers. Doug may not, as yet, be legendary, but he proves here that he fits perfectly into the mould.
