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Review: Aoife Nessa Frances, Rough Trade – ‘A little bit magical, a little bit dreamy, a little bit late-night’
There’s something magical about a Sunday evening gig at Rough Trade. It feels as though you’ve slipped into a different world – one that’s a little bit hushed, a little bit dreamy, a little bit strange.
Dreamy and strange would certainly fit as a way to describe Ora Cogan. Her three-piece, Canadian band are otherworldly, odd and shimmer like moonlight in puddles. They sometimes play that weird 70s folk that, should you ever try and find an original vinyl copy, would cost you thousands.
It’s slightly jazzy, slightly Lynchian and feels as though it’s growing from the earth around us. There’s a bit of a shoegaze glisten in there too and the whole thing is deliciously skewed.
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Aoife Nessa Frances has been picking up some serious press for her latest album, Protector, and it’s very easy to see why. In those reviews she’s been compared to, amongst others, Mazzy Star, Kevin Ayers and The Velvet Underground. She is, in short, a little bit magical, a little bit dreamy, a little bit late-night.
Playing with a full, three-piece, band the Dublin singer/songwriter makes music that is almost perfect for a Sunday night when the best option is to slide away from the real world. Everything has a lazy, heart-heavy groove, a sinuous, bruised swirl.
https://twitter.com/Aoife_N_Frances/status/1589262695416889344
There are blue-washed serenades aplenty with the title track of the album an early stand out. Gentle drums and a jazzy keyboard serve to frame the torchiest of torch songs with heartbreak and hazy stories lurking in every shadow.
Frances’ voice is husky and scorched, it is pain etched and glorious. Slightly earlier, on Only Child, that voice is joined by a discordant, treated clarinet and the shiver of an ice-cold guitar. Guitar and drums locking together as the clarinet makes the sound of walking away.
Much of Protector was written in isolation, in the wilds of Southern Ireland, and there is longing and looking back splashed across all of these songs.
Way to Say Goodbye seethes and churns with passionate despair, great splashy drums and insistent washes of sound break all around. It’s elemental and hugely powerful.
Just as powerful is Chariot which might not have volume but it still writhes with a gently hypnotic pulse. How much of this great music has been born from a hurt heart?
Every single song in her short set showed that Aoife Nessa Frances can wrap an audience up and take them off to somewhere else entirely. This was a particular kind of late-night magic.
Main photo: Huw Williams
Read next:
- Review: Joanna MacGrego, St George’s – ‘An extrodinary evening from one of our most restless musicians’
- Venue of the Month: Strange Brew
- Connect: The new series that brings artists and producers from across the UK together
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