It’s a chaotic hump day; a city caught in windy, wet weather, art, music and film festivals, and neon installations. In amongst the maelstrom, the City Recital Hall houses a tranquil evening of stripped-back compositions from Sarah Blasko.
It’s dubbed a soloist tour, an ‘unplugged’ session that scales her songs back to their bare essentials. Blasko describes it best when she says it takes the songs right back to their embryonic demo form. In the past, she has done the odd song or two without accompaniment as a part of her sets, and Seeker Lover Keeper provided a scaled-back set-up with fellow musicians, but a whole evening of going solo takes the purist concept further, narrowing the focus further on the songwriting and vocals.
Blasko and her support act (LA-based Cameron Avery) have never been ones to lean on their backing bands, but there’s an appealing vulnerability to seeing them both tackle a full setlist without any support. Avery’s early piano-led songs are LA Conventional, but he soon warms up the crowd with his magnetic charm and is clearly enjoying ploughing through what he self-effacingly calls his ‘hits’ on home soil.
His Hollywood musings really take flight when some Americana grit is filtered into his classical crooning, as on highlights ‘Wasted On Fidelity’, ‘Watch Me Take It Away’ and a classy cover of Alexandra Savior’s ‘Girlie’.
When a predictably frilled Blasko takes to the stage, she immediately commands with her voice and no additional instrumentation for opener ‘Down On Love’. From here she drifts from piano, to acoustic guitar, to ukulele (“The instruments are getting smaller,” she remarks), but always the anchor – that voice.
There are nods to the electronic backbone of her most recent album Eternal Return on ‘Beyond’ and a new song that’s possibly called ‘Heartbeat’, though it’s the spare and simple album tracks like ‘An Arrow’ and ‘Is My Baby Yours?’ that really soar. We go full circle for the encore with a couple of tracks from her debut album The Overture & The Underscore.
A preview of new material bodes extremely well and an aching ‘I Awake’ is quick to banish images of careening Fords. It all points towards (yet another) reawakening for this consistently excellent performer.
Sarah Blasko played the City Recital Hall on Wednesday June 8. Photos by Ashley Mar
