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Review: Daughter, Trinity Centre
Daughter have a thing for playing churches. With swelling guitars, sparse percussion and singer Elena Tonra’s ever-haunting vocals, the folk-tinged indie trio’s sound is accentuated in hallowed halls. While the Trinity Centre might not be especially hallowed (one too many drum & bass nights may have blasted any holiness away), the old church is a perfectly intimate setting for the congregation who have come to watch Daughter’s sold out show.
The love-child of the romantically coupled Tonra and guitarist Igor Haefeli (and drummer Remi Aguilella, but that sounds less poetic), Daughter quietly charmed their way to critical acclaim with a handful of EPs and their 2013 debut LP If You Leave, filled with brutally frank songs concerning bitter lovers, abortion and drug-fuelled escapism in Amsterdam. Cheery stuff.
Swimming in smoke and softly illuminated, the crowd is held in hushed reverence by Tonra’s voice, wistfully delivering lines most would save for tear-stained diary pages. “I sometimes wish I’d stayed inside my mother/ Never to come out” she sings on Smother, before cooing sorrowfully as the song closes. New tracks from their upcoming album Not To Disappear are debuted and the subject matter is as jolly as expected, with recent single Doing the Right Thing narrating the devastating effects of dementia.
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More rousing tracks Human and Winter quicken the pace somewhat, lest the audience be forever lost in blissful reverie, but Daughter are at their most atmospheric on the slower numbers. Aguilella’s drumming flutters and pulses like flourishing heartbeats, while Haefeli adds his guitar effects to their expansive landscape. On Still, he rakes a bow across his guitar’s strings, but they might as well be heartstrings for the mournful sound they produce.
The band’s penultimate track of the set is their most recognisable. Youth, with its running guitar line and sombre declaration of “If you’re in love, then you are the lucky one/ ‘Cause most of us are bitter over someone”, is the anthem of bruised romantics everywhere and you can practically hear the heartache as the final refrain of “You caused it” rings out. Closing with Home, Daughter are let loose with its post-rock outro: the lights flash and the drums crash in cathartic crescendo before coming to an abrupt stop with a stomp of Haefeli’s foot. Sadness has never sounded so sweet.
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