Live Review: Stella Donnelly, Jade Imagine and Mia June

Northcote Theatre

Tonight (24 February) is unseasonably balmy, and the queue flowing down High Street toward Ruckers Hill is filled with stylish people who are clearly very excited to be there. In fact, Sydney’s Mardi Gras would be hard-pressed to have a queerer crowd than the one filing inside and filling the front of Northcote Theatre. This is the first show of Stella Donnelly’s national tour to promote her new album Flood, and no one here wants to miss a second, not even of opening act Mia June.

“I’ve never been here before. You guys are so nice!” the Perth singer-songwriter says with a genuine sense of surprise. Everything she does seems genuine, and we adore it. June and her four-piece band play a song she introduces as “the most depressing song I’ve ever written.” One that, over a few simple thrummed chords, builds to a climactic chorus of “I think about you now as if you’re dead.” The audience cheers the song as it is still playing, largely because of June’s humble delivery and colossal voice. 

Other songs, Melbourne, Try To Cry, Hungry, and the closing Fish In A Bowl, showcase her combination of diary-specific moments (one song about a former partner’s “shit poetry” goes over especially well) and her ability to swoop from a back-off-the-mic piercing high note to a confessional whisper. Mia June is a real discovery and a talent unlikely to remain at the bottom of a bill for long. 

Following June’s youthful confessionalism would be tricky for anyone. Thankfully, Jade Imagine deal in a very different energy. Opening with Gonna Do Nothing, the first in a set heavy with songs from 2022’s immaculately produced album Cold Memory, the sense of restraint and their signature cool touch perhaps come across as too controlled for the crowd. Well-crafted songs, leavened with warm synth, cooed vocals and the occasional George Harrison-esque guitar lick, is a terrific combination, but much of its power is lost in a room that seems to prefer overt personality and close-mic’ed melodic pop than chilled synth-driven grooves. 

Cold Memory is a Goldfrapp-esque slice of dark synthwave driven by a Herculean bass riff that should have turned the crowd into disciples. Instinct That I Want To Know pushes the BPM and generates a tension between Jade McInally’s moody vocals and the band’s surging rhythm section, giving a sense of taking flight. It’s a combination that is also used especially well in their set closer; the gorgeous I Guess We’ll Just Wait, a song that generates the enthusiastic response they deserve.

Stella Donnelly arrives beaming over the similarly insistent beats of Tavares’ disco classic Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel blasting over the PA, but barely audible over the cheering of the crowd. Stella is enthused by this. Really enthused. She opens her set with Lunch from her 2019 album Beware Of The Dogs, which gets explored as thoroughly as the album she’s here to promote, Flood. 

Regardless of her songs’ subjects, most of which range from pretty dark to very dark, everything is delivered with a wide Emma Wiggle-style grin (and that’s long before we get to Die with its “everybody join in” crab dance, a performance that could easily double as an audition tape to join Australia’s best known colour-coded entertainers). But given the energy on stage and the volume of love in the room for Donnelly's songs (and by virtue of their intimacy, her), it’s impossible to imagine them being delivered any other way.  

“This song is dedicated to anyone who peaked in high school,” she says, introducing Medals. To judge by the response, it sounds like we all peaked in high school. Later, she apologises for her new haircut, a shoulder-length perm. “I look like a half-sucked mango pip,” she jokes, though, to this reviewer, it's a welcome reminder of her magnificent antecedent, Angie Hart. Donnelly’s hair acts as another means to express her dynamism as she twists her head when she’s not singing, as she rushes from instrument to instrument between songs and as she bugs out to the few sections of a song in which she’s not playing. We’re bugging out too.

How Was Your Day?, Flood, Move Me, and Beware Of The Dogs are bops that turn the audience into an almost-deafening choir. But the moments that truly stun are those quieter ones. Jack Gaby and Julia Wallace’s fluid multi-instrumentalism, Donnelly’s show-stopping, tear-jerking take on Underwater, with its billowing clouds of dry ice in purple light, the surprise choral ending to This Week and her invitation for Gaby to “do some Norah Jones shit” on the piano during her memorable ode to self-love, Mosquito. Whatever she does, the audience wants more of it.

Lungs is one of Donnelly’s greatest examples of what she does best, making empathy sound irresistible. That this wasn’t the song to take her from sharehouse favourite to household name is mystifying. Donnelly thanks her band, tells us we’re amazing and closes her set with Tricks, which sees her on her back kicking her legs in the air before somehow delivering another example of egoless vocal pyrotechnics. With no encore, just Talking Heads’ Burning Down The House valiantly failing to drown out the cries of “one more song”, people file out, laughing about how they’ll see each other Tuesday night at Julia Jacklin’s show at the Forum. Undoubtedly, the collective call is...it’s pretty hard to pick holes in a perfect show. 

Live Review: Soccer Mommy, Phoebe Go, Garage Sale

Croxton Bandroom

Even before the first of tonight’s two support bands begins, the room is almost full. It’s been another long, hot day, but there is no hint of lethargy in the crowd of mostly twentysomethings, and energy levels are set to upbeat anticipation. Local four-piece Garage Sale acknowledges that their inclusion on tonight’s bill is “pretty wild” before proving that they are a perfect fit. Fans of early nineties indie guitar pop will find plenty to like on the band’s 2022’s cassette release, Shimmer, most of which gets an airing tonight. Opening with the album’s closing track, To Confide, the tone is set with huge, distorted choruses and frequent synchronised dynamic shifts. 

On record, you can hear the influence of UK shoegaze bands; live, it's much more American indie. Songs will dip in volume to make way for Dan Sullivan’s shy, melodic vocals, and it’s an addictive combination, especially when his bandmates join him on the microphone. When the set closes with the band’s latest single, Shoes On, and the unreleased Movie, there is a definite sense of the entire venue being on board, a rare thing for the first band on a three-band bill. 

Some people seem at home on a stage, and it is an instantly relaxing experience to watch them. Phoebe Lou, the fulcrum of four-piece Phoebe Go, is one of these people. Tonight’s set is a glorious mix of songs from the band’s acclaimed EP Player and, as Lou introduces, an unnamed song “that I started writing a couple of days ago”. Opening with The Kid, Phoebe Go’s set is full of radio-ready pop songs that make you wonder why they aren’t already famous. 

The band’s musicianship is almost distractingly good, but it's Lou’s charisma that keeps drawing attention back. When she is humming her way through an unwritten verse or nailing the recent single Be The Player, Not The Poet, we love whatever she’s doing, and there’s no doubt the band leave tonight with new fans.

“We’re Soccer Mommy. Thank you for coming out,” says Sophie Allison. “We’re very happy to be back in Melbourne; it’s been a long time. We’ve got two albums of new material since we’ve last seen you.” True to her promise, tonight’s set is full of tracks from her most recent albums, the lockdown favourite Color Theory, and last year’s Pitchfork-adored Sometimes, Forever. 

Joined by her partner, guitarist Julian Powell, guitarist and keyboardist Rodrigo Avendano, bassist Graeme Goetz and drummer Rollum Haas, Allison’s music is evoked with an almost disconcerting tightness. Songs that you can drift into through headphones – layered, spacious sensitive productions with intimate vocals – are brought to life with Haas’s podium-shaking beats, Goetz’s room-shuddering bass and three guitars. Allison’s stories of physical and mental illness are vividly rendered, and the whole set, from the Portishead-dark of Unholy Affliction to the singalong choruses of Shotgun and Circle The Drain, is oddly euphoric. 

At the microphone, Allison’s face is framed by her ruler-straight hair. As soon as she leaves it, her face disappears behind flailing brown curtains as she hacks away at a guitar, living the cathartic outro of Yellow Is The Color Of Her Eyes and the surging chorus of Don’t Ask Me. “We love you, soccer mother!” a fan shouts to her between songs. She smiles and talks about how she “recently became a mother”, to which the crowd cheers warmly. “To two cats,” she continues. “They’re six months old.” She jokes about missing them so much she could get on a flight right now. 

There is a real sense that the audience feel they know a songwriter as introspective as Allison, and to be caught up in a chorus like "Sedate me all the time / Don't leave me with my mind / Paralyzed / Paralyzed / Crawlin' in my skin" speaks volumes to her songwriting ability. After a solo rendition of early favourite Still Clean, the band return for an encore of the song that introduced her to most of us, Your Dog, a gloriously unifying end to a night that should nourish the heart of anyone doubting the power of a guitar and the well-written song in 2023.

Live Review: Cowboy Junkies

Melbourne Recital Centre

Outside, a short while before showtime, pedestrians were wincing their way past the rain-lashed windows of the Melbourne Recital Centre, umbrellas inverted. Ubers hissing by in the rain, their prices surging to a height not seen since New Year’s Eve.

Inside the honey-coloured interior though, all is calm. On stage, the band quietly take their seats as the applause dies down, a delicate thrum emerges from the guitar amp and the Cowboy Junkies ease into their set with a cover of Neil Young’s Don’t Let it Bring You Down. As bassist Alan Anton lurks stage left and guitarist Michael Timmins sits hunched over his electric guitar, his brother Pete busies himself across his many drums and cymbals, the sound elevated in the room, often to the detriment of the band’s greatest asset, the voice of Pete’s older sister Margo. Sitting on a stool next to a small table holding a vase of proteas and a cup of tea, her platinum blonde hair reflecting the lights, as soon as she begins to sing the room audibly relaxes. This is what we came for. 

Behind her sits Jeff Bird, who, as the show progresses, moves adeptly between harmonica, slide guitar, percussion and mandolin, which is usually heavily treated to sound like a heavily distorted electric guitar, a sound jarringly at odds with the experience of watching him play. The band’s decision to play their best-known song second, their cover of Lou Reed’s Sweet Jane, is a bold move, and one that speaks to the confidence of a band whose lineup has remained unchanged for nearly 40 years.

“The promoter is here tonight,” says Margo Timmins, as the rapturous applause dies down. “When we started talking about this tour of Australia and New Zealand, I was 58. Now I’m 62,” she says, laughing. “What we’re going to try to do tonight is sell records. That’s what we’ve been trying to do for decades now. But first, we’re going to do two sets, the first is songs from the album we were planning to tour four years ago, All This Reckoning, and in the second set, hopefully, we’ll get to a song you came for.” 

The set progresses with emotive folk funk of The Things We Do to Each Other and Missing Children, and a cover of The Rolling Stones’ No Expectations and David Bowie’s Five Years, but it’s the subtle signature perfection of their own Dreaming My Dreams of You, from the band’s career-making album The Trinity Session that really shines. Whisper-close vocals, subtle instrumentation and the audience filling the space with silent enthusiasm, it’s everything a fan could hope for.

After a fifteen-minute break, a move that suggests they’ve occupied the spot of their own opening act, the Cowboy Junkies return with the bluesy warble of I Don’t Get It before moving into the opening tracks from their similarly legendary 1990 album The Caution Horses, ‘Cause Cheap Is How I Feel and the magnificent Sun Comes Up, It’s Tuesday Morning. The crowd cheer the opening bars of each and Margo smiles, her warm voice inhabiting the characters of the songs. Women who feel like they could command an Annie Proulx short story or inspire a song by Alvvays.

As they begin the psychedelic boogie of Blue Guitar, Margo coughs. She walks to the back of the stage, the rest of the band seemingly oblivious as she stares at the curtain behind them before wandering off. Michael Timmins spirals away on his Telecaster, the band remaining in symmetry. After several minutes Margo Timmins returns to the stage with a cup of tea, dunks the tea bag several times, sips it and returns to her seat before delivering the final verse in spellbinding fashion.

After a brace of acoustic songs that take in another Neil Young cover (Tired Eyes) and a stunning, silencing version of Rake by Townes Van Zandt, Margo plays what she calls her “favourite Junkies song, one that makes me cry sometimes”, Bea's Song. Between these, Margo shares stories. One about a St Louis venue so mouldy because of its proximity to the Mississippi River that it was a relief it was washed away. Another about travelling to Chicago to play a concert and crying with a friend because they were about to turn 30, an impossibly huge number to two women in their late 20s. A third about how dazzling it was to walk in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens this morning and see “such wild birds, and even wilder trees”. "We couldn’t have mornings like this if you didn’t buy tickets and make the promoters happy. So, thank you,” she tells us.

Closing with their majestic Misguided Angel, A Common Disaster (“a song dedicated to my cold”, says Margo) and the dirty, dynamic blues of Walking After Midnight, what really stays with you after a Cowboy Junkies show is the sense of the people in the band. Their set may have largely comprised songs by other people, but when a band has been playing together for so long and played so many shows, the comfort they have with each other, the smoky magnificence of Margo Timmins voice when she draws in close to the microphone, or its power when she throws her head back and delivers a full-throated vibrato that even a cold can’t dull, it’s a reminder of how few bands have played as many gigs as Cowboy Junkies, and how few bands will ever have the opportunity to play even a tenth as many today.