Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit Blow Into L.A. With Powerful ‘Weathervanes’ Songs at the Hollywood Bowl: Concert Review

If you could think of albums as like magazines, Jason Isbell might offer the most reliable subscription in the music business. Every three years (formerly two, but who’s counting), he issues a record almost exactly as world-class as the last, to the point that it almost feels predictable to pile on accolades, for either the recordings or the tours that follow. An album like 2023’s “Weathervanes,” and the shows behind them, qualify as pure inspiration, delivered with workmanlike reliability — the healthy flow that a rarefied combination of journeyman-ship and genius will bring you.

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So the audience at the Hollywood Bowl for his show there Sunday could count on certain pleasures, 17 years into a sterling solo career, and 23 years in overall: superior singing, emotionally intelligent songwriting and blazing guitar playing… a triple-threat status shared by Richard Thompson before him and, after that. not a whole lot of others. Also reliable: the fieriness of his prominently billed band, the 400 Unit, which, despite some recent personnel changes, is never going to be anything less than a 1000% unit on his watch. They’re there to support rock’s so-called poet laureate with mostly super-tight arrangements, while offering occasional glimpses of the jam-band-laureate beneath.

What you can’t see coming in an Isbell show is the setlist, which varies a huge degree from night to night. (Although, if you come hoping to hear “Cover Me Up,” that’s one where you will never leave disappointed.) It’s been 13 months since his latest album, “Weathervanes,” came out, with L.A. getting him on the late side of the album’s touring cycle. Would he still be as into the new, or new-ish, album at this kinda late date as a west coast crowd starved to hear it was? The answer was plainly yes, as Isbell devoted fully half of his 14-song set to the 2023 release. This was good news for the type of following — did we say subscriber base? — that was bound to value getting a first-time local live treatment of these numbers at least as much as “If We Were Vampires” (to name the other certain staple of his concerts).

It was probably just a coincidence of setlist construction that, on this balmy L.A. night, Isbell bookended the show with particularly powerful numbers from “Weathervanes.” (Setlist stats show that at the show right before this one, he’d opened and closed with completely different numbers, as is his wont. Probably not even the Dead and its offshoots have mixed things up in such a way that virtually any fresh or catalog number could easily move into the kickoff or climax positions.) “When We Were Close” and “Miles,” the starting and finishing songs in question, couldn’t be better examples of the wellsprings of rock power and emotion Isbell brings to much of his material — in a stolid, unshowy way, one that doesn’t leave his heart out on his short sleeves.

“When We Were Close” wasn’t necessarily written with the idea of kicking off an amphitheater barnstorm, telling the fairly downbeat story of Isbell’s eventually estranged friendship with the late Justin Townes Earle. As specific as the inspiration is, that song makes for a nice overture, lyrically, to a lot of Isbell’s empathetic concerns, which sometimes boil down to: There but for the grace of God go we. (Or, as the refrain actually goes, “You were bound for glory and grown to die… Why wasn’t I?”) It doesn’t hurt that there’s a slash-and-burn quality to the riffing of Isbell and fellow lead guitarist Sadler Vaden that makes the song feel like a rougher and tougher rocker than it is at heart. Isbell also busting out the first of the night’s slide guitar solos — melancholy and energizing all at once, like the song might be slipping either off of or back onto this mortal coil.

“Miles,” meanwhile, is a great set-ender for Isbell, although he doesn’t always employ it as such, just as it made an effective album closer for “Weathervanes.” At seven minutes plus, and split up into multiple parts, it’s the closest thing he’ll probably ever do to prog-rock, and a complete outlier in his catalog — but why should Billie Eilish get all the contemporary suites? The song starts off as if Neil Young & Crazy Horse were narrating “Cat’s in the Cradle,” with verses about a marriage and parenting that are taken for granted or pass too quickly… then grows bigger, turning into a kind of epic musing on the Big Picture and how “in the name of survival, we get used to this.” Regular drummer Chad Gamble was joined by utility player/second drummer Will Johnson for a lot of pounding with mallets to complement the guitar racket. It marked a kind of rock grandiosity that Isbell usually shies away from, but when you’ve spent that much time humbly underplaying things, sometimes you’ve earned your right to a finish that kind of wants to say something big and loud about life itself.

Is it weird to think you could go to a rock show like Isbell’s and actually be thinking about the themes of the songs? Not everybody will, of course, but the narrative vividness of his material almost makes it kind of hard not to, even when there is a surfeit of exciting musical interplay taking place on stage. How do you listen to “King of Oklahoma” — a Grammy winner this past February — and not think about whether there’s any chance at all for the guy in the song to escape his “shit’s about to get real hard” spiral of pain-pill addiction and copper-wire theft? But Isbell and Vaden did their best to take our minds away from it at the end, just as surely as the narrator’s opiates take his thoughts away, with a pair of strong, sequential guitar solos.

The two lead guitarists don’t always take turns. Another showpiece number was “This Ain’t It,” sung as a father’s advice to an adult daughter who’s about to make a bad marital decision, but most vivid in concert as a chance for Isbell and Vader to do a conjoined guitar solo. In other words, it’s their Allman Brothers Band number, more or less, with the two guys sometimes playing in perfect unison, sometimes diverging before they come back together, but offering the kind of crowd-pleasing musical chemistry that tells an audience: This is it, actually.

Gamble continues to be a great anchor on drums, never more than on “Stockholm,” which particularly benefits from his cascading fills and rolls. Among the things that feel a little different this time around, Anna Butterss is proving a highly valuable new addition on bass (replacing the recently departed Jimbo Hart, understandably missed by many fans), particularly with the deft touch they provide moving to the stand-up bass on a surprising amount of the songs, not just the obviously acoustic ones.

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The two big romantic songs of this night, and of seemingly every Isbell set, “Cover Me Up” and “Vampires,” hit a little different now, with Amanda Shires and her violin and female harmony out of the band, due to divorce, and the audience no longer training its attention to her and Isbell as a couple to look for either real or imagined chemistry. The band had previously toured without her, when she was active with her solo career, so it’s not completely as if audiences had never experienced the 400 Unit as a fiddle-free band, but it’ll still feel like a period of adjustment for many. At least for now it can be said that the band has a slightly leaner, less ornamental sound, as a result — although it seemed like keyboard player Derry deBorja was getting in more accordion soloing than remembered, on songs like “Middle of the Morning” and “Cast Iron Skillet,” and it seems at least possible that that’s a calibration helping make up for the loss of another familiar instrument in the mix.

Isbell wasn’t at his chattiest at the Bowl, and maybe that was due to the lack of a foil who used to bring him out more on stage, or maybe because he was truly (as described in the lyrics of “Middle of the Morning”) “raised to be a strong and silent Southern man” — or maybe because it never hurts to just be about the business in rock ‘n’ roll. One would suspect it also could have to do with the truncated nature of this particular set, making getting on with things imperative. Isbell and company played a show that was five songs and a half-hour shorter than the headline sets they’ve been doing other nights on the road, frustrating some fans who didn’t realize that, under the banner of a KCRW-sponsored night, this was a co -headline bill — with Sylvan Esso — and both acts were thus scheduled to get a trimmed-down 75 minutes. It was a little disconcerting to hear Isbell start talking about foregoing the pretense of an encore barely an hour after coming on stage, and the Bowl’s early Sunday curfew meaning the L.A. audience would not be getting to hear any of the covers he has been trotting out on most other tour dates, like R.E.M.’s “The One I Love” or the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven.”

But gift horses don’t always need to be looked in the mouth, and it’s hard to imagine a tighter, more self-contained hour-and-15 (or hour-and-20, by the time “Miles” stretched past the 10:15 cutoff) than what Isbell and band delivered. Or a better use of a chunk of “Weathervanes,” however long it took for that album’s live treatment to blow into Hollywood.

As an Isbell fan, it would be easier to be a little churlish about the surprising-to-some co-headliner time limitations if Sylvan Esso, the not-really-“opening” opening act, wasn’t so damn good, and deserving of the longish slot the electronic duo got. The pairing of an Americana mainstay like Isbell with a pure electropop act might’ve seemed incongruous to a few fans, or like a KCRW arranged marriage. But it made more sense than it might have appeared on first blush, and Isbell went out of his way during his closing set to praise the pair and remark upon how good it felt to perform with an act you actually want to hang out and see.

By hailing from Durham, N.C., Sylvan Esso might fit at least loosely into an affinity group with the Alabama-bred Isbell, even without a guitar or drummer in sight and Nick Sanborn being a one-man band. Singer Amelia Meath has some chameleonic qualities, and on another night her folkier qualities might make her even more of an obvious pairing with Isbell, or with Tyler Childers, whose Madison Square Garden gigs the pair just opened. In any case, this felt like electronica with a human face and feel — and so much more welcome than getting an opening act for Isbell that is another dude with a guitar, just not as good.

Highlights included “How Did You Know,” in which Sanborn manipulated his electronics for what almost sounded like a trumpet-y finale, and the closing “Echo Party,” which Meath said was “about a secret dance party after the world has ended.” Given the weird political churn of events during the week leading up to the Bowl show, this analogy seemed more apt than it possibly otherwise could have.

There was yet a third act on the bill, Uwade, a young Nigerian-North Carolinian upstart who is soon to release her debut album (but may be known to some from her appearance on a Fleet Foxes album). Her short, winsome and unpretentious solo set did an even nicer job of setting a table than all the servers busy setting up dinners in the Bowl’s box areas.

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