Mia Dyson, Jen Cloher & TheEndless Sea, Liz Stringer @Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane(26/02/09)

Sun 1st Mar, 2009 in Gig Reviews

Jen Cloher and her band the Endless Sea open proceedings early, and I mean early. It isn’t much past 7.30pm when the Judith Wright Centre lobby lights began politely flashing to usher us inside.

They open with a new one then hark back to Cloher’s first album Deadwood Falls with the driving song Rain.

The singer said it had already been a big day for The Endless Sea.

“We’ve just got off a plane, four of us squeezed in the back of a Tarago, in here for a quick sound check then across the road to throw some Grill’d (burgers) down our throats and now we’re on stage. It’s a bit surreal being here.”

Cloher introduces Time Among the Pines by saying it was about a weekend she’d spent with her friend Mia Dyson on New Zealand’s north island.

Her sound is clean and crisp as the Kiwi air, and she confidently keeps the songs moving along so her band is free to experiment and improvise. At one point, the viola player bows the back of a saw instead of her instrument. Later, the drummer bows one of his cymbals.

They end with Grant Lee Buffalo’s song Fuzzy , Cloher turning to each member of the band in turn, giving them a moment to shine. The song ends on a note of melancholy with a soulful piano and viola interlude.

Mia Dyson sneaks onto the stage with her band without fuss and takes a position in the middle left, rather than the middle.

She plays new single People Will Turn on You early, swigs from a short glass and says “why, thank you” like an old-fashioned country star.

Dyson, the daughter of guitar maker and Blues guitarist Jim, never tries to shrug off her roots. She pays tribute to her grandfather with the song No Other then her mother, saying: “my mother is a very special woman and I wrote this song for her. Whether she wants it is a different matter.”

Liz Stringer, a gifted songwriter in her own right, accompanies Dyson and comes into her own when the singer slides behind the piano for some of her new tracks.

The best way to hear the Blues is at a table with a candle, a bottle of red and a friend. Dyson takes this intimate ritual and transplants it into the small, classy Judith Wright Centre, setting out a smattering of candle-lit tables between the stalls and the stage.

“Our first concert in Brisbane, the first time we haven’t played in a pub,” she says with the hint of a curtsy.

Dyson seamlessly blends songs from her new record Struck Down with old favourites for the fans. The driving title track shows a songwriter at the peak of her skills. Her trademark raw energy and emotion is still there but the new songs show a maturity and consistency missing from early records Cold Water (2003) and the much-loved Parking Lots (2005).

“A couple of these we haven’t played before so I expect some charity from you,” she demands.

She plays with a vigour that verges on violence, sometimes hauling her axe into songs so quickly she surprises even the band. When she pulls away from the microphone, you could be forgiven for forgetting just how strong her whiskey voice is: when he leans in to start a stanza, it’s often a shock. I guess it’s lucky her hubby was in the sound box – only he could cope with the wild throws in her songs.

But when she has the audience swaying in time and wincing at the electric wail of her guitar, she quietly slides in behind the piano to serenade us.

Come encore, two fans up the back are dancing. They yell their request: Roll On from 2003’s Cold Water.

“I don’t know how to play that on a piano,” she apologises. “Thanks for the call but we’re going to do something different.”

On piano, she plays a Leonard Cohen-style accompaniment she wrote to Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken; then picks up her guitar and leads the band in The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (The Band), which we’re all still humming in the car park.