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T O P I C R E V I E W
lemonade kid
Posted - 03/03/2015 : 16:51:27LIZ GREEN
Liz Green is a Manchester-based singer-songwriter. In 2007, Green won the Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent competition. In 2011 she released her debut album, O, Devotion!
Right from the get-go, it's clear Liz Green is not your average blues-inspired folk singer. Instead of a conventional support act, the Mancunian opens with a 20-minute retelling of her favourite fairytale, Fenist the Falcon, replete with green-eyed shadow puppets and a piano accompaniment redolent of Erik Satie and Russian melodrama.
She begins her set proper among the crowd, stamping out a raw rendition of Son House's Grinnin' in Your Face, and follows that with five minutes of tuning up her rickety guitar, which ought to be excruciating for the audience but proves riveting thanks to Green's sly humour. The title track from her debut album, Displacement Song, feels like an excerpt from a Brecht-Weill musical, with tuba and trombone muttering darkly over a queasy waltz. During another Brechtian number, Bad Medicine, she introduces the "least seen but most popular member" of her band Team Me: her own parping mouth trumpet. By the time she details the sorry history of Starling Joe (an imaginary half-bird, half-man), his wife Oko Parrish and their 12 slaughtered children, and dons a home-made fabric mask to sing the nursery rhyme Who Killed Cock Robin, you realise you're in the presence of someone deeply eccentric and rather magical.
Where her album feels trapped in a single register, on stage the limitations of Green's clipped, irony-laced voice rarely make themselves felt. If anything, the narrowness of her vocal range focuses your attention on her lyrics, their romance and sauciness, unsettling violence and wry humour. And it amplifies the wonder of the rare moments when she allows that voice to take flight, notably in Gallows, a performance so spare it feels like a shiver.
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music".
-Aldous Huxley
2 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First)
lemonade kid
Posted - 04/03/2015 : 13:33:33
quote:Originally posted by stewart
regularly plays with The Great Park http://www.thegreatpark.co.uk/ whose songs she's covered a few times eg Displacement Song
Right, Stew. I believe you turned me on to The Great Park and those his album downloads.
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"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music".
-Aldous Huxley
stewart
Posted - 04/03/2015 : 01:42:12 regularly plays with The Great Park http://www.thegreatpark.co.uk/ whose songs she's covered a few times eg Displacement Song
