Otouto + Seja

Meeting for the first time in Adelaide – at the inaugural date of their (sort of) national tour – it's perhaps safe to guess that double headliners Otouto and Seja had not much of an idea of what to expect from each other's live shows. Stylistically, they appear almost as opposites with seemingly little to connect them beyond a mutually high concentration of x chromosomes; energetic synth-driven peppiness pitted against smooth, bare art pop.

Seja’s first performance with her current backing group (Renae Collett of Gazoonga Attack and Meredith McHugh, ex-The Rational Academy) revealed the chasm between the confident tidiness of her album We Have Secrets But Nobody Cares and the awkward reality of a slightly clumsy show in front of a thick, tentative Melbourne audience. Seja grappled with technical mishaps at a couple of points, encouraging the tightly-packed crowd to "talk amongst yourselves". Unfortunately, the chatter didn't really stop when Seja and company resumed.

It was never going to be easy to replicate all of those overdubbed synths and vocals, but Collett did an admirable job of keeping time with pre-recorded backing tracks, and the group had plenty to do in spite of them. Predictably, the standout song was the deeply likeable lead single from Seja's album, the mid-tempo ‘I’ll Get To You’. Its closing arpeggio, teased at not-quite-shredding pace from a Roland Juno keyboard by the Brisbane artist’s long fingers, would have been the perfect ending to a show that took some time for the both band and audience to settle into. Instead, Seja ended things with a dance routine set to 'We Can't See Past Our Hands', which she and McHugh enacted rather nervously. With a little polish and a few more shows behind them, and perhaps a less subdued crowd, Seja's trio could work pretty well. Tonight was more of a learning experience, but a good one to watch all the same.

Presuming that the crowd was dominated by the band's hometown following and vast network of friends, Otouto found themselves fronting an entirely different room to the one Seja just vacated. (That said, people could be overheard in the crowd pondering the Brown sisters' relationship. "Are they twins?" one punter asked another, who insisted that Hazel was clearly the elder of the pair.)

With the perfect, effortless wandering vocal melody of ‘Autumn’, the trio opened a powerful set that covered every last song they’ve ever committed to disc. A dozen minutes in, it was clear that Otouto were on top of things, turning in near-flawless renditions one after the other. To their credit, too, the weakest moments of Pip (which they're here to launch) were much better in the flesh: the chirping outro of 'Low Dan' took on a new shine as Martha Brown stretched across two keyboards, looking briefly like a pre-teen dressed in her grandmother's blue satin dress. Similarly, the serious, morose sentiment of 'Tennis Players' was somehow softened by the warmer, bigger sound of a live show and the lessened emphasis on Hazel’s vocals (which, by contrast, are mixed high on the recording).

The crowd’s energy flagged noticeably as Otouto embark on a run of their quieter, slower songs, and when they pick up again with peppy radio favourite ‘Astronauts’, they don’t fully recover – but that’s not important. As ‘Sushi’ b-side ‘Walkie Talkie’ demonstrated, the band are more than capable of buoying a lumbering pace with clever flourishes. Though possibly the most lethargic song in their repertoire, anchored by Hazel’s lumbering down-strums on her baritone Danelectro, the piece still managed to include kitchen percussion, stop-start drumming and vocal samples to keep things obtuse and noteworthy. In fact, it’s one of their more cohesive, satisfying tunes. As on Pip, each song was carried on a skittering, clanging wave of Kishore Ryan’s unique drumming. Dressed in his usual flannelette shirt and jeans, the lanky percussionist made nuanced instruments of pots and pans and, sometimes, made the drumkit seem like some humiliatingly basic invention.

Uncannily, despite their complex melodies and harmonies, the Brown sisters never once missed a note. Both are possessed of incredible vocal control, making Otouto perhaps the closest thing Australia has to Dirty Projectors. Like that band, too, the sisters struggled with clumsy banter between songs, made up mostly of “thank-yous” and the occasional non-sequitur.

Otouto are lucky to be in the sweet spot that art-pop bands sometimes find themselves in: they’re fresh from the creative exploration of their first album, with a newly defined sound and ideas to burn. They may never again be this effortlessly inventive, and they may have played this hometown album launch to their most dedicated and supportive crowd, but I still can’t wait to hear what comes next.

by Jon Tjhia