Perhaps best known for
her contribution to Sydney band Bridezilla, Daisy M. Tulley kicked off the
evening as the velvet-curtained room slowly filled up with punters, coming in
from the wet/cold Melbourne eve. She seemed uneasy and we soon found out why;
‘There Will Be Sadness’, written for her late grandfather, was dedicated to her
recently deceased grandmother. “The funeral,” she said abruptly, “ is next
week.” You can imagine where the set went from there. Tulley’s emotional
wailing was held naked and aloft over the looped guitar and violin, swathed in
reverb and occasional feedback. Said feedback created a bizarre sense of hostility
that punctuated the remainder of the set with frustrated stops and starts.

‘If I Had A Child’ was
full of latent, if somewhat menacing maternal instincts, while ‘Stare’ was all
voyeurism and sultry folk. Tulley stalked the stage like a weary gazelle,
deftly delivering her instruments and loop pedal to their atmospheric heights. Her
voice recalls a throaty latter-day Joni Mitchell, Melbourne songbird Laura
Jean, even The Cranberries’ vocalist

Dolores O'Riordan
at times.
The songs themselves were
promising but Tulley needs to relax on stage if they’re ever going to fly.

Rising to prominence with
a cover is a tricky thing (Alien Ant Farm, anyone?). Thankfully, First Aid Kit’s
cover of Fleet Foxes’ ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song' is staggering and beautiful
even off the back of the Youtube bandwagon. Being something of an Internet sensation,
I was unsure of what to expect. But Swedish sisters
 Johanna and Klara Söderberg delivered above and beyond expectation; there were buckets of charm, possible adoration of Gram Parsons, awkward sibling quarrels… But I digress.

Joined on drums by
their tour manager after just one rehearsal and the previous night’s gig, FAK
ditched the amplification game a few times by doing a capella versions of
‘Ghost Town’ (standing at the edge of the stage and keeping the ruffians quiet)
and the Buffy Sainte-Marie protest song ‘Universal Soldier’, standing in a
hasty clearing on the floor for the latter. Their voices deserve to be heard pure and unadulterated by fickle music
machinery; the unplugged performances recalled the apparently forgotten value
of acoustic performance, and inadvertently highlighted the abysmal lack of good
acoustics in most venues.

New track ‘The Lion’s
Roar’ is single-worthy, though it fails to outshine the rendition of ‘Tiger
Peasant Mountain Song’ that had everyone silent as nuclear winter. Occasionally
the dialogue seemed recycled or weary, but the performance was fresh, the belts
high-waisted, and the music remniscient of such female country artists as Emmylou Harris, Patsy Cline, the Be Good
Tanyas and Patty Griffin.

My Gram Parsons
suspicions were vindicated when, in a very new, unnamed song, they sang “I’ll
be you’re Emmylou, I’ll be your June/If you’ll be my Gram and my Johnny too”…Right
before a cover of Parsons’ ‘Still Feeling Blue’. But hey, if you’re gonna deify
anyone, it may as well be that guy. Sigh.