Three decades of female heroines rock Sydney in a single night
LORDE
Aware Super Theatre, March 13
Reviewed by MILLIE MUROI
★★★½
The lights are low and the scene is set for two stars to emerge. One, a giant sun, overlooks a huge sundial; the other starts on the stage as a silhouette.
It has been a decade since Lorde’s debut studio album Pure Heroine, and six years since she last lit up Sydney, but she blazes her way through this concert like she has her whole career: from shadow to shooting star.
Lorde generated untempered energy from fans.Credit:Rick Clifford
“I have a very specific relationship with Sydney,” Lorde tells us. “It was the first city I went to outside of New Zealand for work. A room full of people at the Goodgod Club came to see me sing, and you really adopted me, so thank you so much.”
Lorde’s Solar Power World Tour is a slow burn towards a crescendo, but shows how the pop prodigy’s style has evolved yet retained the spirit of a generation.
The mellowness and dystopian lyrics of Leader of a New Regime from her most recent (and polarising) album Solar Power give way to harmonies and a reflection on modern love in medley Hard Feelings/Loveless. Meanwhile, Royals, the Billboard 100 topper that raised Lorde to international status at just 16 years old, is an anthem that continues to strike a chord with the city’s youth.
Lorde’s first trip outside of New Zealand for work was to Sydney in 2014.Credit:Rick Clifford
This show is no blockbuster production, stripped down for the most part to a minimalist, symbolic set scattered with low-key instrumentalists and back-up singers. It lends an intimate feel to the concert that in the beginning can ebb in zeal, but which suits soft ballads like Liability. There are also moments such as in Fallen Fruit, where a swaying backdrop takes the audience on a psychedelic trip.
Lorde’s dancing might be awkward but her funky, spontaneous movements are also expressive and liberating. It’s the Grammy Award winner’s voice, though, that radiates most notably. Controlled yet delivering a depth and clarity lost in recorded music, Lorde’s vocals alone are a reason to see her live.
The queen of alternative sings that “all the music you loved at 16 you’ll grow out of”, but the echoing chants of her lyrics prove otherwise.
Lorde plays another show in Sydney at Aware Super Theatre on Tuesday, March 14.
FLORENCE + THE MACHINE
Qudos Bank Arena, March 13
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★
Saying Florence + The Machine go big is like saying Hugh Grant didn’t want to be on the Oscars red/champagne carpet, or Naatu Naatu had some dance moves. In fact, a proper Oscars reference would say Flo + The Mo in concert is everything everywhere all at once. And that’s a well-deserved, seven-trophy compliment.
Drums in the quasi-metal Daffodil land like the punches Florence Welch throws to start the night, and the harp ripples like the drapes of her peignoir (an outfit style repeated a hundred-fold in the flower crown-bedecked audience). Backing vocals expand to invisible choir status in the florid Dream Girl Evil, and Ship to Wreck comes at us with the same Hussars-charging fervour coming from the bouncing mosh pit.
Florence Welch’s energy carried the gig on a mostly bare stage.Credit:Flavio Brancaleone
And this on a mostly bare stage set at the back with what might be a multi-tiered table from a desolate wedding day, with candle wax covering every element. Druids are in the room; Miss Haversham is in the house.
This is the concert we should have had last year when restrictions were finally loosened and everyone ran free like year 3s at the 3pm bell. This is the concert we should have any time someone tells us the only way to do pop shows is to bung on the dancers and turn up the taped sounds, or ramp up the teen screams.
Not that this is missing physicality or audience involvement. As she sings in the booming Big God, perched on the front barricade, held up by hands and hope, “You need a big god, big enough to hold your love/You need a big god, big enough to fill you up”.
Welch has the vocal power to knock down the walls of Jericho without need for piddling trumpets.Credit:Flavio Brancaleone
Watching Welch run through the crowd during one of her most Kate Bush moments, Choreomania – a word for the kind of manic dancing that might once have been called St Vitus’ Dance – is to feel the electric surge of a contact high. Lord knows what a charge it must give her. To feel the waves of voices hitting like the pounding-feet rhythm of (a thrilling) Dog Days Are Over is to be reminded heart-starter is not just an expression.
A decade ago, in the Opera House, Welch played a show shorn of most of her band, an orchestra taking their place. Its set list leaned heavily into the grand, tragi-romances end of her repertoire, and theoretically should have been a Big Dramatic Pop success. It wasn’t, because the light-and-shade was missing, the flourishes only having one expression.
There’s no such mistake here: instead of blurring the emotional fault lines, the shifting tenor emphasises each one.
When June rises, it feels insistent, inexorable, a tide of emotion taking you with it. Prayer Factory is Gothic splendour writ small, or at least short, its ghostly presence meaty rather than ephemeral.
And Girls Against God – as in Hunger – is both firm and quivering.
Firm and quivering, rather like her voice, that thunder-and-waterfall weapon that in most songs comes to knock down the walls of Jericho without need for piddling trumpets.
So, yes, big. Michelle Yeoh flying-kick-in-your-face-level big.
BIKINI KILL
Opera House Concert Hall, March 13
Reviewed by JAMES JENNINGS
★★★★
In the early 1990s, Olympia, Washington band Bikini Kill used their status as outsiders in the male-dominated punk-rock scene as fuel for their fiery songs, in the process birthing the riot grrrl movement and becoming feminist icons.
Fast-forward 30-odd years and the reunited group are outsiders once again, but this time because they seem like the type of DIY punk band more at home playing a beer-soaked club rather than the Opera House Concert Hall.
Bikini Kill, here in Melbourne, have returned to Australia for the first time in 25 years.Credit:Rick Clifford
The disconnect is not lost on frontwoman Kathleen Hanna (“This feels a bit like musical theatre,” she quips, “but it beats $2 basement shows where people spit in your face”), whose chat between songs is often hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking and as rapid-fire and direct as the band’s catalogue of short, punchy punk songs.
The formal sit-down nature of the show is jettisoned once the core original members Hanna, bassist Kathi Wilcox and drummer Tobi Vail, joined by touring guitarist Sara Landeau, launch into opening one-two punch New Radio and This is Not a Test, the audience rejecting the absurdity of watching a punk show from a chair by getting on their feet.
As the band tear through a blistering set of songs with superb titles like Resist Psychic Death, Suck My Left One and I Like F—king, Hanna bounces around like a hopped-up ’60s go-go dancer, having the time of her life and staking a claim as the coolest woman in punk rock.
That coolness is underlined by an unfiltered interaction with the adoring crowd, with Hanna happily noting the wide range of ages, which stretches from greying Gen-Xers to tweens perhaps drawn in by ’90s nostalgia.
With so many young girls in the audience it’s exciting to think how many might be inspired to follow in Bikini Kill’s footsteps and start their own bands after the show, emboldened by Hanna’s advice to ignore the critics.
The band finish on shout-along anthem Rebel Girl, which, along with the rest of the set and tales of dickish male rock’n’roll gatekeepers, guys you shouldn’t go home with and how playing music is a useful form of therapy, acts as a raucous crash course in Feminist Punk Rock 101 that we’re all lucky to be schooled in from legends of the scene.
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