We arrived to be greeted by the wonderful shimmery tribal glistening on support act Sam Hamilton, recently returned home from an overseas sojourn. Sam triggered mystical synthetic sounds that throbbed and pulsed, while Will, his live drummer added a human dimension and heart(beat). Vocal yelps and haunting wails populated the magical panda-collective/animal-bear like sound-scapes created.
Merrill Garbus aka TuNe-YaRdS took the stage, greeted by eager whoops from the audience, opening with Do You Wanna Live? A question enthusiastically replied to by the near-capacity crowd with a more and more resounding affirmative every time she asked. She was joined on stage by her bassist and two saxophonists all donning sweat-bands in a hipster-kinda-way.
Woo-ooo vocal sirens; sax stabs and bass throbs on perfect beat as she quickly got Gangsta out as the second song of her set. By this time the audience weren’t so much eating out of her hand as much as setting up full dining rooms on her palms and ordering the banquet. And as thrilled as we were to have TuNe-YaRdS here, Merrill seemed equally as thrilled asking “how do you all even know about us this far around the world?”, exclaiming “this is so cool!”
Powa was breath-taking; Merrill’s high notes perfectly on point. Throughout the set she’d juxtapose sweet vocal delicacies with fierce tribal rhythms and then flip to warm guttural vocals to counterpoint complex and aerial tip-tap-rat-a-tat rhythms. It struck me, watching her perform, that it was like someone had taken the imagination of 1000 children and squeezed it into her. Watching her build an intricate loop from scratch was like watching some magical experiment unfolding before our eyes; it was minute-ness amplified. It was like taking the skeletons of the newly discovered Paedophryne amauensis frogs from Papua New Guinea and magnifying them up to the size of a blue whale – in audio format.
The duel sax’s during Bizness were mind-blowingly great – the song became so infectious, even the most grumpy and cynical of old men, like me, would forgive a conga line had it started, while obviously being far too uptight to join in myself. Shit, by this stage I’d have even maybe forgiven someone with fire poi’s – I was in such high spirits. That said, it was hard to look past the woman nearby who broke into some form of interpretive dance; a crime that surely even the most liberal-hearted party-vote-Green-er could tolerate.
Merril told us that even our carrots are “eight times bigger than ours” whatever she meant by that; before all four band members joined in on an onstage pogo-in-unison as their penultimate song drew to a close. As Merrill built the looped rhythm of the last song some audience member let out that wooo-de-wooodilly-wooo noise that the older boys in the boy scouts used to do. I knew then that the audience had indeed going joyously feral – we were ready for any episode of Survivor, I can tell you that for free.
During the encore she shared a story of her Aunt emailing her asking her to be on the look-out, while here in New Zealand, for a NZ hideaway for the entire family to escape to in the event that Mitt Romney wins. We didn’t at this point, have the heart to tell her about John Key. Merrill was, aside from being immensely talented and entertaining, charming, genuine, humble and special; this was a show that people will talk about in years to come with tears in their eyes; and nu-hipsters will lie about being at when they weren’t. - review by Andrew Tidball
Gig photos to follow
