Review: Paul Muldoon and Rogue Oliphant Forge Poetry at Joe's Pub

At Joe’s Pub on November 26, 2024, Paul Muldoon and Rogue Oliphant exemplified what happens when rock musicians have nothing left to prove yet everything left to say. The pre-release show for their upcoming album Visible from Space featured songs that push well beyond rock’s familiar obsessions, while maintaining its essential fire.

The band — featuring veterans from The Pogues (Cáit O’Riordan), Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue (David Mansfield), Chris Harford, Ray Kubian, and Warren Zanes — brought decades of musical sophistication to literary-minded compositions. The evening opened with “Thing For You,” which subverted the typical love song by placing modern desire in historical context. By name-checking everyone from Eve and Adam to Pyramus and Thisbe, they elevated the speaker’s fascination with their love interest to literally historical proportions.

The arrangements and singing consistently enhanced Muldoon’s intricate wordplay, particularly in “After the War,” where subtle instrumental textures supported the meditation on how conflict transforms both landscape and memory. The language might sound obscure for the pop-rock scene, but the focus on how war’s aftermath lingers situates the piece right amongst the ranks of “Leningrad” and “The Unknown Soldier.” When Muldoon intones that “life is lived in miniature after the war,” it serves as both observation and lament, the band’s instrumentation providing a somber setting to this exploration of diminished expectations.

Some of the evening’s most compelling moments came when the band indulged in free association. “Hit Machine” portrayed a creative partnership, where opposites seemingly attract each other, while “Reading Too Much” managed to work as both a rock song, and a contemplation on social cues and yearning. These pieces showcase Muldoon’s ability to find profound meaning in seemingly casual contrasts. Perhaps most striking was how they handled love songs. “Only Thing” cleverly employed conflicting tastes and ideologies (dim sum versus barbecue, right wing versus blue) to examine incompatibility without resorting to either youthful angst or cynicism, whereas the title track, “Visible from Space,” measured affection against human-made wonders, somehow making grand gestures feel both epic and intimate.

The evening felt less like a traditional rock show and more like a masterclass in lived experience. The lineup reads like a who’s who of rock history, but Paul Muldoon and Rogue Oliphant are not trading on nostalgia; they’re showing us how rock ‘n’ roll can age into something richer and more complex. In an era where youth often seems like the prime currency, they offered something more valuable: the perspective that comes from living through enough history to understand its cycles, while maintaining enough passion to want to break them

Learn more about Rogue Oliphant on Paul Muldoon's website here.

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Best Orchestrations - Top 3

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