The sound coming from Brisbane’s Art Of Sleeping was agreeable in the background but in focus it was lacking in figuration. Their tunes were fairly inconsequential, making dim employment of nu-folk’s delimiting elements: songs centred in wispy vocal harmonies and banjo-fingered acoustic guitar building to a valour announcing climactic gesture, performed with feigned importance. One can only hope that disguised beneath all their closed-eye head-lolling there’s some utilitarian function.
The Paper Kites are also rather earnest, but the Melbourne deployers of neo-Peter, Paul & Mary sounds were much more believable than the support act. Bringing their Young North EP tour to a close in front of a hometown crowd, tonight the five-piece proved to be a well-practiced outfit and played some memorable tunes with hints of personality included. Lead vocalist and songwriter Sam Bentley shared a friendly onstage correspondence with Christina Lacy; the two swapped electric and acoustic guitar positions and vocalised in delightful unison. Lacy took the lead for a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams, accurately imitating Stevie Nicks. Off to either side of the stage stood the reliable bass player and the multi-stringstrumentalist (guitar, banjo, lap steel), and when it was heart pounding time the drums spoke up from behind. A few very sparse new songs introduced subdued intimacy to the full-house Friday night Corner crowd. This was a bold experiment and some of the songs, perhaps still in the development stage, held back a little too much for the interested ears to properly acclimatise.
Bentley’s between song chatter was easy-going, avoiding the unengaging tendency to be either too thankful or glumly shy. A strange phenomenon going on in the crowd was the bizarre-o equivalent of heckling that belongs to this sensitive sub-culture. In a farcical attempt to create pristine silence, incessant shooshing was coming from the same sort of characters who I’d guess maybe just a couple of years ago were skittishly yelling at rock shows.
The Paper Kites’ songs are well put together and Bentley implements the genre requisites with confidence. His songs have a narrative undercurrent and the few times he gave pre-song plot summaries indicated this is something he likes to proudly emphasise. Yet, despite how impressively poised his voice was, and the excellent fusion with Christina’s voice, when the deliberated subject matter was put into practice it fell a little flat and I couldn’t detect much needing to be expressed, nor particular depth of intrigue.
This provoked the question, what is this contemporary so-called ‘folk’ movement on about? As far as my understanding extends, ‘folk’ music is a communicative medium, an opportunity to voice a shared concern and offer relief. Despite bearing the most earnest of dispositions and widely donning beards (ostensibly a uniform of experience), the prevailing folkies don’t seem to be saying much and it’s unclear towards what end this solemn quietude is going. Regardless, The Paper Kites’ best tunes, such as the encouragingly sincere Bloom, had many of their humble fanciers enacting sweet security by acquiescing the ‘hold your partner close’ directions.
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
LOVED: (Another) Friday night at The Corner.
HATED: The lack of accordion.
DRANK: (Another) Friday night on the Steam Ales.
