Jen Cloher
Corner Hotel, Melbourne
Tuesday January 23, 2007 with 0 Mess+Noise champion in attendance.
Jen Cloher’s struggling with the standard-issue singer-songwriter stool tonight. “I feel like Kermit the Frog or something – legs just hanging over the side…” The fourth date on her national tour with Laura Veirs finds her struggling with little else though. Her set has the tightness and slickness only consistent gigging can deliver. After touring with a full band for the Dead Wood Falls album launch tour in 2006, she’s playing in stripped-back form for these shows. Andrea Summer’s violin and Michael Hubbard’s second guitar flesh out the instrumentation of her Americana-inspired confessional songs. She veers to the quieter side of her debut record and the set lifts when the trio harmonise.
On a night of singer-songwriters and playing with such spare backing, Cloher’s powerful voice is pushed into the spotlight. So too are her lyrics, revealing some of their deficiencies. If she has a tendency to the pedestrian (“As the days go rolling by / you were always on my mind”), it’s shown up by the superior lyricism of the acts either side of her tonight (Emily Ullman and Laura Veirs). Cloher defers to Springsteen at one point, playing an engaging version of ‘State Trooper’ from Nebraska. Here, the excellent instrumental interplay backs up a song with an engrossing narrative. Cloher could do well to follow its lyrical model – it’s the lagging element in an otherwise good show.
by Ben Gook
