Project Description

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IRON & WINE

@ Canberra Theatre Centre

01/06/18

(Live Review)

Reviewer: Benjamin Smith

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Hipster extraordinaire Iron & Wine is currently touring the country with local aww shuckster Fraser A. Gorman and on the first of June they brought the show to the capital. 

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Gorman is an artist I’ve been seeing a bit of  over the last few years and its always a pretty pleasing experience. He comes across as a genuinely nice bloke and that comes through in his music. They are earnest songs about things that seem like Gorman has been touched by personally. The comparisons to Dylan are obvious, but also a little shallow. Probably any curly-haired folkster with a harmonica brace and a guitar would attract the same comparisons but his influences are much broader than that and his Australianness is a defining feature of his performance and writing style. As support he doesn’t play for long, but the set is well received and afterwards he takes position at the merch desk and signs copies of his Slow Gum record.

When Iron & Wine come to the stage it is as a full band including a cellist and a percussionist who’s never-ending rotation of banging, rattling, jingling, tapping and bowing instruments added a dimension to the sound that unquestionably enriched it.

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Iron & Wine is, however, Sam Beam. And Beam is a curious mix of humble, rumple-suited sensitivity and cocky showman. More than anything he is the master of the moody. The songs are uniquely, atmospherically hypnotic. They are unsettlingly easy to get lost in, even in a live setting. His stage set was effectively simple, blending lights and some suspended clouds. It sounds clumsy, mawkish even,  but actually it was charming.

What makes it all so likeable, I think, is the imperceptibility of the whole thing. The sound is so disarming that you can listen many times and realise you still have no idea what he’s talking about. Also, you go about the business of listening to try and figure it out and realise somewhere through the fifth track that you’ve been in kind of a daze and forgot to remember what you were trying to do. The harmonies and the multi-layered subtleties work so well that unless you’re consciously dissecting the elements they operate so as to wash over you without you even knowing.

He enjoys some banter with the crowd and is good-natured, though not entirely knowable. There is a nice relationship with the room and with the audience which seems effortless, and the temperature of the room is considerably warmer on the way out than it on the way in. Sometimes that’s all you hope for, sometimes its everything you can hope for.

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Photo – Jenny Black

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