Reviewed onMonday November 21
Filing into the dimly lit Newtown Social Club is always a pleasure. The place is easily one of the best venues in Sydney, and provides an intimacy that is hard to match at any of the bigger rooms. Young singer-songwriter Elizabeth Hughes set the tone immediately, opting for an amplified clean guitar mix that seems to be quite popular lately. She delivered a set that was focused more on storytelling than instrumentation, but that’s no bad thing. Crooning to and joking with the audience all at once via her anecdotes about life and her folk-inspired melancholy rhymes, it was clear that Hughes is one to watch out for.
Emma Russack came next, and had the audience captivated. She too offered the audience stories that inspired her music, but were indeed more raunchy, or as she herself put it so elegantly, “scandalous”. Between tales about threesomes and dating a B-grade celebrity who she confessed was more than double her age at the time, Russack pulled the onlookers in and kept them there for the whole performance. She even claimed she wouldn’t be bound by contractual obligations that stopped her from playing certain songs (most notably that one about dating a B-grade celebrity). Awesome.
If Julien Baker’s set was the quietest gig of the year, then the crowd was the loudest by comparison. The Memphis singer-songwriter walked onstage to a round of cheers that she evidently did not expect upon playing her first night in Sydney. Her guitar seemed extremely soft at first, but Baker assured us this was all part of the show, and launched into choice cuts from her debut release Sprained Ankle.
Keeping things minimal while providing a complicated songwriting palette that draws on themes of depression and self-worth, Baker more than deserved the ravenous applause that greeted the end of every song. Hoping for an encore, but left wanting, the crowd exited hungry for more. Elusive to the end, this was but a first taste of what Julien Baker can do.
