Pikelet
The Toff In Town, Melbourne

There is a healthy, if slightly quiet midweek crowd here tonight, and the Toff is set up in old school cocktail lounge style, with lots of small round tables clustered near the stage. Everyone can get close for what has been announced as the few Pikelet shows scheduled for the rest of the year.

On record, Pikelet’s music comes across as tough and percussive while simultaneously being eerie and sweet. Live, Evelyn and her band are rather different, with a more expansive and organic feel. In a lot of the songs, when you get past the technology, the heart of the matter is often a fairly straightforward folk-ish music of picked guitar and crooned, sometimes wordless vocals. Not that any of this music is about the technology - it uses it, rather than being driven by it.

Pikelet herself is the thing that makes it more, with her wit and ideas. Though she’s a small figure on stage, there is a sense of real strength, as well as something of a “How did she do that?” factor, when she sits down and plays solo, swapping instruments and hitting switches to set up her loops and samples of looped xylophone, guitar, voice and anything else that takes her fancy, building huge sounding songs one chunk at a time. It’s a torrent of skill and ideas.

There may be some insight into her character in the between song asides, which range from a curt “Ready?”, to “This one’s a disco song, and we’d like to dedicate it to ABBA”, to “This song is about a man who wishes he was made of light”. But more telling is the way that last remark leads into a beautiful sounding tale of obsession and self-immolation, and the sly smile she flashes at the end of it.

by Trevor Block