Reviewed onFriday October 14
Too often beauty gets confused with scope. There is a dominating misnomer that to be powerful, music has to be big – that the only choruses with the ability to wrench hearts and dominate inner lives are loud and large and full of a crashing aggression.
But such a hypothesis ignores the pleasures to be found in the work of musicians such as The Finks’ Oliver Mestitz. Kicking off his set armed with only the plastic keys of a Moog organ, the poet-cum-balladeer danced his way through the band’s most recent record, the very fine Middling, with a distinctly understated charm.
None of Mestitz’s songs overstate themselves, or linger for a second too long, and thematically they concern themselves with the kind of ‘oh-that’s-sorta-interesting’ twists of fate most commonly found in the filmography of Jim Jarmusch or the poetry of William Carlos Williams. A cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ was timely, given the husky bard’s recent Nobel Prize win, but more than that, it felt right in a way that covers sometimes don’t, and it proved to be a perfect intersection between song and singer, as Mestitz shrank down the pleasures of Dylan’s songwriting without ever sullying them.
Though Jen Cloher and The Endless Sea’s Dead Wood Falls, performed in its entirety to celebrate a decade since its release, might not seem to share much with Mestitz’s tunes on a surface level, Cloher is similarly a master of the minuscule. Proving as ever to be a songsmith with the uncanny ability to make plain life’s minutiae, Cloher powered through Dead Wood Falls with such reckless abandon that one could have sworn the songs were being given their first showing.
Part of that comes from Cloher’s sheer generosity as a singer. Dropping stories and tunes in equal measure, the artist exuded both warmth and the sort of very genuine kindness that seems to be a rare currency amongst performers these days. After all, there’s a reason Newtown Social Club’s stage is only slightly raised: there’s so little separating artist and audience, and Cloher worked on eliminating what boundary there was with a precision bordering on the surgical. Indeed, by the time it was all done, performer and punter were indistinguishable, all jostling for space, and all joined by music.
