It may seem paradoxical to describe the driving hard-rock sound of Grace Potter and the Nocturnals as comfort music. But a sense of familiarity, of a time-honored ritual expertly and reverently re-enacted, is one of the attractions of this Vermont quartet, which played a 100-minute set at the Allen Room on Thursday evening as part of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series.
The Nocturnals’ lead guitarist, Scott Tournet, has said that the group wanted its newest CD, “This Is Somewhere” (Ragged Company/Hollywood), from which it performed many songs, to sound like an album made in 1973. And it does. In rock history that is the High Renaissance.
Ms. Potter, the band’s 24-year-old lead singer and songwriter, played a Hammond B-3 organ (one of three keyboards on the stage) as well as guitar. The organ is the most the distinctive element in an instrumental sound that suggests a composite of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Band, Crazy Horse and almost any other meat-and-
potatoes rock outfit from the early and mid-1970s. The music defines what is meant by the term classic rock. The other two players are Matt Burr, a drummer with a fondness for “Be My Baby” kick-start intros, and the bass guitarist Bryan Dondero.
Vocally Ms. Potter has a high, fervent folk-rock delivery that suggests a grittier Patty Griffin. A theme that runs through her tuneful songwriting is passionate, often painful sexual combat and the continuing clash between her insistence on independence and the inconvenient emotions that turn relationships into power struggles.
Religion also enters the picture. Ms. Potter has a nagging conscience, knowledge of the devil and an apparent belief in heaven and hell. Her faith (or at least her search for it) was most powerfully manifested on Thursday in rock spirituals like “Big White Gate” and “Nothing but the Water,” which pray for redemption and purification without quite preaching.
Like many classic rockers before her, Ms. Potter addresses politics metaphorically. The band’s minor hit “Ah Mary” mounts a furious accusation at a woman (a surrogate for a high-ranking politician?) who has “dirty money,” who “puts herself a notch above humankind,” and who will “bake you cookies, then she’ll burn your town.”
As Ms. Potter sang the words “She’s the beat of my heart, she’s the shot of a gun/She’ll be the end of me and nearly everyone,” she implicated herself in the imminent disaster, suggesting that there is a vengeful part of “Mary” in everyone.
