Matisyahu, Snob Srilla @Prince Bandroom, Melbourne(13/08/09)

Mon 17th Aug, 2009 in Gig Reviews

You know that feeling when you look around church while everyone is singing in harmony, reaching out the palm of their hands to as if to touch God’s face, and a sense of profound peace would catch you off guard and lift your feet off the ground? There was some of that going on at the Prince Bandroom, where religion is music and music is religion.

A few minutes before Matisyahu a.k.a Matthew Paul Miller graces the stage, the crowd has already built up into an army, all geared up with adrenaline and anticipation for the explosive beats that is about to make the stage seem larger than all of us present. And for the entire night, everyone is slave to the rhythm and some of us could only set ourselves free in a mosh pit, even at the expense of losing some valuables from all the commotion. You could feel the audience baked in sweat from the packed venue.

While Matisyahu puts on a powerful show, crowd favourites are obvious but narrowed down to older songs such as Jerusalem and Youth. He also performs tracks from his latest album, Light such as So Hi So Lo that slows the show down to a sombre state, quoting Oscar Wilde – ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’. The chorus goes, ‘So high, so low/I don’t know where but we’ve got to go there’. The song that keeps everyone hungry for more is unsurprisingly his recent single and the finale, One Day which transcends more closely the sensibility of Bob Marley.

Matisyahu’s beatboxing drives the crowd wild, as we could feel every inch of his percussion – the high and the low, the fast and the slow and everything in between. Yet if it wasn’t for touring band, Dub Trio, especially drummer Joe Tomino and guitarist D. P. Holmes, whose performance literally make the hair on our skin dance and would send shockwaves through a dead heart, Matisyahu’s thin, siren-laden voice would have been incomplete. It is Dub Trio’s musicality that brings rock’s prestige to Matisyahu’s performance.

Opening act, Snob Scrilla also delivered an effective warm up, especially during the last number, King John that is dedicated to his homeless friend in Sydney who passed away. Scrilla preaches to the audience, ‘Put your hands up for the less fortunate…Let’s take a moment’ and everyone put up their left hand far above, listening to the sounds that lingered on stage.

Matisyahu, dressed in his usual hoodie jumper, said little to the crowd but maybe that is enough. You could see that he embodies every guitar riff, every bass line, every roll of the drum and every word that slips from the tip of his tongue. And Matisyahu was in time, in tune and in the right state of mind. You could see that he is in awe of the movement of people in the crowd and he often smiles at us, as if the world is right again in his eyes, like stopping short to admire a beautiful painting and knowing that his music means something. And with this trust for the audience and their strength it seems, Matisyahu dives into the crowd for as long as everyone could carry him.

CHECK OUT THE PHOTOS FROM THE GIG HERE