Suzy Connolly – Night Larks (Laughing Outlaw)

Filing the debut solo album from Sydney guitarist and songwriter Suzy Connolly on the melodic guitar-pop shelf next to artists such as Aimee Mann and Matthew Sweet, who it turn draw their inspiration from Big Star and The Beatles wouldn’t be offensive to any of those artists. But there are moments on her debut album when she manages to transcend her musical lineage and come up with some surprising songs that stamp her as a distinctive artist in her own right, rather than simply a great new example of a very recognizable and well travelled sub-genre.

One of those moments is on the harrowing Company Man, when she dissects a failed relationship with a surgeon’s skill utilizing a sparse background that has a similarity with Adalita. A similarly dark mood pervades Faking Your Best, a song that offers a revealing honesty. Your Comedown has a knowing, sneering edge that belies its exhilarating pure pop melodicism, while Skydive is an unashamedly shimmering pop rock tune, slightly ‘by-the-numbers’, but hard to dislodge from the sub conscious.

Connolly’s golden voice is her cornerstone, but producer Josh Schuberth (Josh Pyke, Ben Folds) coaxes an intimate and sassy performance from her when she could have been satisfied with riding the wave of the irresistible melodies easily to shore. She is prepared to strive for more than the regulation guitar-pop parameters and is rewarded with an album with a deeper luster than mere surface sparkle.

 

Aimee Mann – Concert Review

Australia had waited a very long time to see Aimee Mann performing live in concert. Too long. She is one of the great pop songwriters of the last couple of decades and although this status has not exactly been rewarded with a plethora of pop hits it has rewarded her with respect and an ardent following around the world.

The people that ‘get’ Aimee Mann, really get her – a good proportion of the audience that turned up to her concert at the Palais gave the impression of being familiar with just about every song she has ever recorded and they weren’t shy in displaying that knowledge by way of requests. It was like stumbling in to a meeting of a secret society. I regard myself as a long time and  solid fan of Aimee Mann’s work but I felt like a virtual ‘newbie’ amongst this crowd.

Aimee Mann was either delightfully spontaneous and random or surprisingly jerky and nervous. I’ve had both suggestions made to me since the concert and in reality the truth is probably half way between the two. It was a new audience for her and the fact that the Palais was noticeably less than full may have given her cause for concern. She did seem like she was feeling her way early in the show and her early interactions with the crowd did seem like slightly nervous attempts to break the ice.

She seemed to abandon the set list early in the show and play a combination of randomly chosen songs with those selected by the audience. This meant that songs from albums like Everything’s Different Now and Whatever were noticeable thin on the ground. The charming Amateur, That’s Just What You Are, Par For The Course were the only representatives from I’m With Stupid.

But the songs that were played were hardly disappointing. She extracted several songs from her Academy Award nominated soundtrack to the film Magnolia. Of these the duelling pianos of Momentum and  the intoxicating Build That Wall were  highlights. Her new album Smilers was also represented  – most notably by Freeway and 30 Today.

The rest of the set came from the albums Lost In Space, Bachelor No.2 and The Forgotten Arm (including the hypnotic Video) as well as a couple of B sides and rarities.

Of course the format of the tour did limit the choice of songs. Mann was joined by two musicians – both multi instrumentalists – Jamie Edwards and Jebin Bruni (who had featured on The Forgotten Arm).  While both are exquisitely talented and in conjunction with Mann herself, were able to cover a lot of musical bases quite brilliantly the three piece format probably eliminated some of the more buoyant, delectable pop-rock songs in Mann’s catalogue such as Fifty Years After The Fair, Lucky or Superball – all of which could have lightened up the overall balance of the set.

It comes down to personal taste really. My favourite element of Aimee Mann’s music is her ability to craft almost perfect pop melodies and deliver incisive and poignant lyrics in the context of such delightful confectionary. For others its her more melancholy and frankly ‘sad’ songs that weave a spell. There was more of the latter than the former but that didn’t prevent the concert from being satisfying.

An interesting contribution was the stripped back version of the Til Tuesday pop hit Voices Carry which deconstructed the song to its spooky essence.

I get the feeling that this is an artist for whom two concerts are never exactly alike. She has an exceptional catalogue and she prepared to delve into it and take some risks. And that surely is a good thing. Oh and it probably should be noted that her voice is just great. She wraps her vocals around these songs in a wonderful way and extracts every nuance from the music and the lyrics. Her singing is often taken for granted but it really is outstanding.

Hopefully it wont be another quarter of a century before she returns.

Aimee Mann To Tour

You wont find too many tours that will be of more interest to this website than the first Australian visit from by Aimee Mann.

Aimee Mann, the LA-based singer and songwriter described by the UK’s Sunday Times as no less than “one the best pop songwriters alive”, will tour Australia for the first time in September, 2009 taking in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

The artist known for her exquisite and understated pop songwriting skills is something of an industry maverick, and is visiting Australian shores on the back of her 2008 album Smilers. This follows 2005’s daring and acclaimed concept album The Forgotten Arm, and 2006’s album One More Drifter In The Snow, another thematic affair which delved into the whole range of seasonal emotions that people have around Christmas.

This time round, the conceptual approach has been dropped in favour of a simple set of high quality songs on Smilers that Billboard Magazine has called “her most compelling album to date.” That praise has been matched almost everywhere else too, with Mojo Magazine offering a 5 Star review saying that “Smilers is a masterpiece from a songwriter who’s quietly chronicling the blanched last days of a sunshine empire.”

From her work in the 80’s with MTV favourite Til Tuesday which included the superlative Everythings Different Now through her acclaimed solo discs Whatever and I’m With Stupid in the 90s, Aimee Mann has always been at the forefront of contemporary songwriters.

The close of the millennium brought her greatest success, with the simultaneous releases of Bachelor No. 2 and the soundtrack to the film Magnolia, which garnered nominations for an Oscar, a Golden Globe and three Grammys. After a decade in which her music often took a backseat to corporate mergers and contractual obligations, the message was clear: Aimee Mann is here to stay.

Throughout a superb series of albums Mann has always been known for her clever, literate, and dryly witty takes on emotional sabotage and self-destruction. She manages to cloth her smart and sometimes bleak lyrics in the most perfect pop melodies that give her fans fodder for the heart brain and ears.

Now, on her seventh solo album Smilers, Aimee presents thirteen melodically-rich, exquisitely-crafted new songs about the inner life of people living far from the bright lights of success or fame. The songs are soulful, empathetic and somehow ultimately hopeful and optimistic. In short, Smilers is a welcome return of unparalleled songcraft.

Don’t miss this opportunity to see one of the great, adult pop artists who takes the form sky high while remaining firmly planted with two feet on the ground. Often compared musically with the Beatles and Badfinger, Aimee Mann is “the Dorothy Parker of rock” (Glamour) capable of pairing the bleakest of poetry with the most soaring, infectious melodies.

Brisbane

Thursday 3 September
Powerhouse Theatre

at the venue07 3358 8600

Sydney

Friday 4 September
Enmore Theatre

Ticketek132 849

Melbourne

Saturday 5 September
Palais Theatre

Ticketmaster136 100