tUnE-yArDs @ the FamousSpeigeltent, Sydney (18/01/12)

Mon 23rd Jan, 2012 in Gig Reviews

tUnE-yArDs singer Merrill Garbus has the privilege of owning the most distinctive voice the Sydney Festival is hosting this year. It’s a powerful, fearless voice that conveys a huge amount of emotion for just one person. These emotions, whether happiness, fear, uncertainty, love or anger, often coexist in complex ecosystems contained within each song. Despite Garbus’ personal history being the framework for her material there are larger themes bubbling away beneath the surface. Human rights, violence, ethnicity and self-image are all explored to some degree and often in ways that challenge normal perspectives.

What really got the crowd on side last week wasn’t the thought-provoking content of her songs but the way she delivered them. An obvious place to start is with her extraordinary voice – It was truly a weapon, a thing of terrible beauty that completely filled the tent and shook everyone right out of their seats. When it was at full power it could probably shoot out into space and be heard from the moon, but when she wanted to she could quietly skip up and down chord scales and deftly jump octaves and not even disturb the pigeons settling down to roost for the evening just above us in Hyde Park’s peaceful canopy.

Garbus has amazing control over her articulation and pitch, but it’s also the visceral thrill of hearing her using her voice purely as an apparatus for noise that’s exciting. Rather than stick to familiar sounds like jazz scatting or oohs and ahs, Garbus has an uncanny intuition for forming sonic shapes that are wonderfully weird but still completely familiar. Her lyrical vocabulary was so sophisticated that sometimes it seemed like she was speaking in a fully functional alien language. Her masterful layering of percussion and vocal loops melted it all together in a wonderful mess of texture and tone, and while there was more often than not dozens of little notes fluttering around each other and tricky rhythm patterns forming and decaying it managed to feel natural and inclusive. It’s as if her intention is to always sound like there’s a little more room if anyone wanted to join in.

That level of intimacy and warmth the show achieved was remarkable. The tent’s small size made it unnecessary to have the mix turned up too much which made the listening experience more relaxed. The dark, earthy aesthetics made everything quite cosy and the small capacity added to the ambiance. The music was so vibrant and impossibly charming that the small crowd became fiercely supportive, completely seduced by its idiosyncrasies.

The addition of bass player Nate Brenner to her project after her first solo album added a lot more depth to her sound, and tUnE-yArDs found themselves developing into a group capable of straddling several genres and achieving a more versatile repertoire. Afro pop, primitive funk and experimental jazz all competed for space in their set, but again they made it seamless and fit everything together flawlessly. Brenner’s explorations occasionally sounded like an old modem on the fritz but even when shit got a little frayed around the edges it was still hard to wipe the smiles off peoples’ faces. Garbus’ versatility with the ukulele was impressive, and the brittle, hyperactive noise-folk jams she was inventing with it was great. Noah Bernstein and Matt Nelson complete the touring band with some great sax playing and various other bells and whistles being hit/struck/shaken/thrown.

The majority of the set was made up of last years end-of-year-list favourite w h o k i l l with no real weak spots. 2009’s BiRd-BrAiNs was represented with a sultry rendition of Real Live Flesh, and the following night Garbus performed a solo set of that album in the Jagermeister Tent next door. Bonus!

tUnE-yArDs is complex, sophisticated, accessible, idiosyncratic and super catchy. It was one of the best shows I’ve seen in a long time for many reasons and a rare occasion to experience just how amazing the human voice can be. I think everyone left feeling more alive than when they arrived, and that is a wonderful achievement.