MARIKA HACKMAN | LIVE REVIEW
St John’s Church, Cardiff, Fri 10 April
You have your fingers crossed, that on this solo tour Marika Hackman hasn’t been saddled with each town’s generic singer songwriter as support, that each promoter reaches past whichever local gonk with a guitar tries to jump on the bill. Cardiff does pretty well in this respect: Toby Hay may look like a painting of the Green Man that someone’s added spaniel ears to, but his music rolls over the pews in gently pleasing fashion, an acoustic finger-picking style highly easy on the ear that’s more in the friendly tradition of John Renbourn or James Blackshaw than the more out-there protagonists like John Fahey (and slipping in a little of When The Saints Go Marching In kind of underlines this). It all drifts by dreamily, and extra points for having a song about conjuring a murmuration of starlings (points off for that not actually happening).
Tour support Sophie Jamieson conjures up ghosts, and even looks a little like a Victorian spirit photograph. The contrast between her ultra-timid speaking voice and her wracked music is jarring to say the least: over a little spidery Jeff Buckley guitar comes this weighty psychodrama, Jamieson’s face contorted as moans and laments flesh out the skeletal backing. It’s spooky as fuck: the gothic-tinged poise of Joanna Gruesome side-project Ides or Constellation Records’ excellent Elizabeth Anka Vajagic are (probably unhelpful) touchstones, but Jamieson’s songs are her own, a desolate exorcism that the pin-drop audience take in gaping awe for the most part.
It’s a respectful reverence that’s as refreshing as it is slightly unsettling (and pretty fitting for the venue, natch), and one Marika Hackman isn’t about to choke in. Where Sophie Jamieson spooks, Hackman soothes, her songs clean and mannered, crisply British and almost alarmingly self-assured. Whereas on record her music floats in lush or opiated amniotic production, here, shorn to sparse acoustic or electric backing, with the odd vocal effect, the atmosphere is harder to create, in this venue where church volunteers offer wine and fruit juice from a trestle table, like some middle class jumble sale. The material from her debut album We Slept At Last charms though: songs like Ophelia or Claude’s Girl are deceptively strong, mature and accomplished and all those other words that usually dry your genitalia but in this case contribute to a set cumulatively heavy with feeling, impressive even if not miraculous.
words WILL STEEN
