SORCHA RICHARDSON | LIVE REVIEW
Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Wed 26 Feb
With a healthy amount of monthly listeners and a lead single with 13 million streams on Spotify, it seems intriguing that Sorcha Richardson’s career continues to exist in an industry-based purgatory. Having received coverage exclusively from just a handful of blogs and local magazines, the wider media is lagging behind, potentially setting up Richardson to be a future overnight success story. Richardson is used to uncertainty however, having spent the last couple of years ping-ponging between her home of Dublin, New York, LA and a smattering of shows across the UK. This turbulence has been imbued in her music, enchanting her recently released and aptly named debut, First Class Bravery, with a powerful emotional weight and candid relatability.
Cardiff’s own Little Rêd opened the evening with a setlist rammed full of her own brand of dreamy, whimsical electropop. Armed with only a loop pedal and her charming voice, Rêd transformed the ordinary and benign into dainty ballads, tackling topics such as the mundanity of 9-5 work and moving on from university. The relative absence of romance made for a refreshing change of pace, and made her powerful tracks more impressive.
Richardson and her trio of band members quickly followed, launching into the ethereal High In The Garden, a track that wouldn’t be out of place on a Wolf Alice release. Her unfakeable warmth and candid aura permeated not only into her performance, but her on stage presence too, helming the band with ease. As a frontwoman she was intriguing, and consistently captured the attention of the, admittedly small, crowd with ease. Sonically, her sound falls somewhere between Courtney Bartnett and Clairo, and regularly deployed ambient backing tracks to enrich and add texture to her performance.
Her setlist was varied and emotionally fickle, as while it largely centred around her recent album release, heavier tracks such as Don’t Talk About were frequently interspersed with her otherwise upbeat discography. A brief lull in the centre of the performance was swiftly followed with some of her most danceable numbers, with Red Lion seeming to remain a fan favourite. After Sorcha rather frankly acknowledged that a fake encore would be a little redundant with a the small crowd, the performance climaxed on False Alarm. Despite having a somewhat underwhelming reception in Cardiff, Sorcha Richardson’s live performance made a compelling argument for why she may become a mainstay of the Irish indie music scene.
words ALEX PAYNE
