Live Review: Cate Le Bon

It’s a trip just entering the space. As part of Vivid Sydney, Carriageworks thrums with a light display that runs through the cavernous foyer. People gather around the Atomic pop-up bar as the red and white lights overhead explode the darkness.

Moving through into the venue, it’s just as cavernous; a wall of colour hits you - the first thing you notice. Then come the melodic vocals of Srisha, the Baulkham Hills-born Tamil-Australian singer who blends ethereal vocals with an infectious attitude to produce a live show full of youthful spirit. Her first release, Euphoria mixes an intermittent hip hop beat and arpeggio before moving into a rock groove and a rap. Her newer tracks, Without You and Lie to Me have more of an R&B feel, making for a more refined sound.

Then comes Olympia who steals the show with her audience engagement. Though she plays solo here, her vocals cut through the night, and her endearing awkwardness when addressing the crowd reels you in. After playing some old songs, she jokes, “I’ll just slip in some new songs…You won’t even know. It’s like going in for surgery.” New song Creep speaks for itself: a song about twisted love with the memorable hook, “Let me be your creep.”

“Ever have someone let you down for a living?” she entreats the audience before launching into an anecdote about growing up where you could hear the Bulli trots. This is the preamble for Nervous Riders from her 2019 album. Here, as throughout the set, her simple yet profound lyrics detail elements of the quotidian and the sordid with equivocating melodies that only sometimes fully expose the sorrow of the worlds she creates.

Again and again, she dissembles with classic Aussie bravado and a self-effacing jokery, echoing the audience: “Aw, you’re fantastic? Did you hear that?Just in case there are any gig reviewers…there’s a consensus in the front.” She weaves awkward analogies throughout her set, joking, “Aw, these metaphors!” Yet, they draw you in and lay the perfect platform for tracks like the dreamy love song with a twang, Atlantis, and Honey, a song that uses the story of beekeepers feeding bees crushed up candy canes as an analogy for a life of excess.

An atmospheric aubergine light welcomes Cate Le Bon and band on stage as they dive into the first track on the 2022 release, Pompeii. Dirt On The Bed has a meditative nature to it with a wall of sound to match the wall of colour behind the band. The latency and the gaps in the song provide a signature that seems to echo the out of joint world in which she composed this album.

Then blue and green lights combine to signal French Boys, another slow-moving track with a more meandering bassline and room to play within the driving melody as Le Bon’s guitar sings out towards the close of the song. Then a deep navy ushers in Moderation, a track that jumps from the pensive resignatory lyrics built around the titular hook to the dancy “Picture a party…”

There is something carnivalesque in the performance which matches and collides with her abstract lyricism and the captivating synthesis found within the five-piece arrangement. The saxophone often comes from nowhere to enmesh the synth and meld with the guitar while the dexterity of the bassline wraps around the simplicity of the drumline which brings the vocals right to the front of this immersive experience.

Le Bon moves through her new album with little discussion or space between songs, letting the music speak for itself, only speaking up to thank the audience and to comment on how dark it is. Then, once the new album is explored in its near-entirety, she moves into the popular, Home To You, changing tacts, shedding her guitar and holding the mic in her hand, trying to find novelty in the song she seemed tired of singing.

Still, nothing could detract from a set that would renew your faith in alternative pop music, music that holds you in place and won’t let you rest until the musicians have called an end. Her face climbs out of the darkness as her voice climbs out of the cauldron of instrumentation to bind you in a unique spell.