There’s a lot of press surrounding Jonathon Boulet and a lot of hefty words being used to describe him – ‘master of all’, ‘pied piper of bedroom pop’ and ‘wonderkid’ are just some of the words used to describe the 21 year old taking on the music world. With a Triple J and a FBI album of the week and excellent word of mouth, did young Boulet live up to the hype?

Opening were the band Kyu, seemingly unknown to most of the people in the room, Kyu took the Northcote Social Club by the throat and shook them up. An absolutely stunning set, wowing the crowd and leaving more than a few fans in their wake. Made up of Freya Berkhout and Alyx Dennison, the duo utilise percussion, keys, backing tracks, effects and perfect, intertwining vocal harmonies to create a cavalcade of ambient sound. Like Sigur Ros thrown into a blender with some tribal music and some heavy pop, Kyu really warmed the crowd up.

Highlights included a song where the two girls both sang the same vocals, but one had major effects on her mic – this gave the impression of a heavy, guttural track following the others perfect vocals, and the lyrics “I’ve got a bad case of déjà vu with you, but you’ve got a bad case of existential woe”. Despite some uncertain, nervous banter with the audience, Kyu really are a band to look out for.

“Good evening and welcome…This is the story of a little girl whose father was a very famous detective” was the strange introduction of Sherlock’s Daughter – strange to both the audience and band members who were heard uttering “so weird”.

Launching into opening song, Sherlock’s Daughter looked quite the professional outfit, bopping around stage and generally playing up a storm of quirky pop and breathy vocals. With an extended outro, it looked as if the crowd was going to be in for a treat, however that’s as far as it went. Not to say the band is a one trick pony, the songs they play are well crafted and interesting, it’s just that they tend to be quite samey and despite asking people to get up and dance, the fact that their music isn’t especially dancey doesn’t really help their efforts.

Vocalist and multi instrumentalist, Tanya Horo, appears to be the foundation of the group, and no wonder – with the crowd scarcely taking their eyes off her for the duration of the gig, Horo sang, played guitar, bounced and jumped her way around the stage showing excellent frontman skills.

The best song of the night was Out Here In The Cold, which saw the guitarist using sandpaper to creating sounds and the bassist playing both his guitar and the drums during the slow building but superb song. The other main highlight was Song For Old People, backed by some Triple J airplay, the song had the best lyric of the night, which despite being repeated a tad too much for one song provided the catchiness of the night (“Where once you were younger driven by the snow, I know, I know it’s life”).

Finally Jonathan Boulet arrived on stage with his band. Looking extremely young (“They look like a high school band” – one punter was heard to utter) the band were quick to launch into a crunchy guitar driven song not on the album. Repeating the lyrics “I will soldier on” the band showed they were here to wake everyone up and shake them around a bit. Unfortunately, the crowd was made up of fans of the album, and despite their polite clapping, many people were unsure of how to take this material they didn’t know.

It wasn’t long before songs of Boulet’s debut album flooded in with North To South East To You opening the preceedings and receiving a hearty cheer. With a new dreamy intro before unleashing a whole new level of energy, the song showed that it was wonderful live, as were all Boulet’s songs.

Many of Boulet’s songs utilise what should become known as chant-song, where the lyrics are chanted and sang for most of the song. This separates him from a lot of the market and sets him aside, though often can lead to songs losing some of their edge as they begin to sound the same. 321 Ready or Not, Ones Who Fly Twos Who Die and another new/nameless track all suffered from this, and while excellent at the time became less memorable because of it.

The song the crowd was waiting for was played last – A Community Service Announcement. With massive airplay on Triple J behind it, the crowd really got behind it with Boulet working the crowd well and offering his mic for the choruses. The excellent, poppy song, really got the crowd going and left them wanting more.

So the question remains; is the hype justified? Well the answer is yes and no. His songs are superb live, with Boulet feeding more and more energy into them really giving them a life of their own, which is excellent. That being said, he didn’t play a lot of the darker pop songs from his album, that could have really benefitted from this energy, instead opting to play songs that the audience were unfamiliar with and often left them waiting for the next album song to emerge. Boulet also suffered from poor frontman-ship – the phrase “if you have nothing important to say, don’t say it” springs to mind – with jokes falling flat and banter falling short of the line. Despite this, with a few more tours under his Boulet will surely blow audiences away.

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