Jess McAvoy

Artist: Jess McAvoy

Where: NXNE Festival- Toronto ON- June 18, 2010- The Cameron House

Who: 30 year old singer/songwriter from Melbourne Australia.

What: Jess McAvoy laments love and relationships while bringing her backstage personality on stage in soulful rock ballads.

Performance:

Jess McAvoy needs to take a real risk in her music and display the powerhouse blues rock goddess that she keeps dumbed down by creative coasting. We want loud and we want proud and when Jess McAvoy gives us this we want more, now.

McAvoy is one of those artists who sounds better stripped to the raw essential elements of acoustic performance. In removing the superfluous instrumentation from her songs she is reduced to her best, highlighting her vocal dexterity and tour- tenured musical wit.

How the Hell, a blues inspired powerhouse anthem about unexpected romantic connection and ultimate obsession, created a high expectation for the rest of her performance. She drove the beat into the floor with a rebellious stomp and shook the walls with her riotous wailing "How the hell d'you get into my soul...". Her voice was so powerful, on even the softest of notes, that you could feel the bass of her vocal tenor moving through your bones. She made effortless transitions and flawlessly maneuvered through minor slide scales with such vigour and with a perfected tone that hearkened back to a young Melissa Ethridge.

What started off with such a bang became a disappointment as she moved away from the visceral clap of her piece de resistance and towards the more mundane folksy compositions of The Hard Way, The Sailor and easy. The rest of her performance was anti-climactic, leaving me to wonder why she chose to demonstrate her best piece first, when none of her other songs could compare in either their innovative composition or in displaying her undeniable talent.

Jess McAvoy's more subdued and lackluster songs demonstrated a form of musical apathy, as they all entertained the same imagery, engendered the same emotions and were composed almost identically in narrative and melodic stylization. Her performance after How the Hell left a bitter after taste. All else was comparatively weak and stylistically uninspired, no matter how she performed it; she outshone herself in the first number. It is as if we're watching her dumb her musical ability down for herself. She sings what is obviously easy for her to create and perform with minimal work. With a little more risk and ingenuity she can stun the audience with her triumphant personality, impressive vocal dexterity and soul rattling lyrical and emotive musical translations.

Song to listen to: How the Hell

Luluc

Band: Luluc

Where: NXNE Festival- Toronto, ON- Friday June 18, 2010- The Cameron House

Who: Unassuming folk duo, Zoe Randell and Steve Hassett. Originally from Melbourne Australia, now based in Brooklyn, New York.

What: Minimalist indie folk music that is delivered with a perfected sense of tone but otherwise delivers the familiar romantic and emotional tropes of this kind of music.

Performance: This duo's mix of vocal mastery and vacuous performance left me cold. While Zoe Randell tuned her guitar and warmed up with the first verse of each song from their set list, Steve Hassett concerned himself with perfecting the subtlest of sound nuances, the likes of which only he could hear.

That said, musical perfectionism counts for something. Their acoustics sound delectably rich and intricate and it displays their vivid imagery with the simplest of sonic analogies. Luluc's ability to impress the mixed crowd with the sheer beauty of their musical landscapes and intricate melodic design was best exemplified in Little Suitcase and The Wealthiest Queen. From the gentle timbre of Randell's voice, to the vaulting resonance of Hassett's vintage guitar, Luluc's musicality is an exact science executed with the scope of a musical sniper aimed at simple elegance.

Luluc's music left me unsatisfied despite its mastery. Luluc's withdrawn and introspective personality translates on stage into a docile, wispy performance. They manage to relegate the audience to its bare function; as a passive-receptive witness at the mercy of the artist's creation.

The similar sound structure of their musical cache lulled me into a stupor, which I would still be in now if the Jack Stafford Foundation had not come on next, to clear our audio palates. They must shake things up on stage or experiment with other audio styles in order to differentiate each song from the next.

Song to Listen to: Little Suitcase