Laura Imbruglia residency at The Excelsior

LAURA IMBRUGLIA
SARAH KELLY
The Excelsior, Surry Hills
04/08/10

August sees a Laura Imbruglia residency at The Excelsior in Sydney’s Surry Hills, with every Wednesday offering up a different theme. The opening night of this run was entitled ‘Solo Laura’ and will be followed by Country Laura, Band Laura and, lastly and maybe most intriguingly, Karaoke Laura.

While the last-minute cancellation of support act, the wonderful Camilla Hill, through illness, was a disappointment, her shoes were ably filled by Sarah Kelly from redsunband. Perched onstage with a guitar, Kelly’s nuanced voice was spellbinding. At times delicate, sometimes with a strained beauty, her textured vocal filled the room and added to an already intimate atmosphere.

Battling through foldback problems and admitting to being a little nervous, Laura Imbruglia put on a typically unpretentious and charming show. Armed with an acoustic guitar, she rattled off tracks from her two long-players. Thanks to her knack of penning superb lyrics, a set from Imbruglia is a collection of well-rounded tales that offer a spectrum of ideas and emotions. One minute she sings about the misery of dating an older man, the next she is yearning for unobtainable love. In Home Sweet Home she talks about being curmudgeonly beyond her years, while in My Dream of a Magical Washing Machine she asks, “What did I drink last night? What did I smoke last night? It messed with my head.” Oldie-but-really-goodie It’s Getting Worse remains a delightfully sweet love song, while You’re a Parasitic Germ lands at the other end of the scale.

The next three weeks seem set to demonstrate that, as well as having many sides to her storytelling ability, Laura Imbruglia can mix it up musically. If you appreciate a fine combination of wit and melancholy, if you are a country fan, a rocker, or just want to get up on stage and belt out some Meatloaf, you should head along to one of these Wednesday night shows and support one of Sydney’s most intelligent songwriters.

Details of the residency here.

Laura Imbruglia - The Lighter Side Of...

When this reviewer was a teenager, he would buy an album on vinyl from his local record shop, then rush home and play it while studying every square inch of the cover and inlay sleeve. Nowadays, as most music is created to be consumed at the push of a button, being able to take joy in an album’s cover art is a sadly rare occurrence.

Hooray then, for Laura Imbruglia, whose long-awaited sophomore long-player comes complete with a mini, Mad-esque comic book, which, as well as being fun, is also a pretty decent indicator that the record is going to be a winner. Well, if she puts this much effort into the liner notes, then you just know the album has been lovingly created.

Indeed, two years in the making, The Lighter Side Of… is a fine offering. Throughout the country, power-pop and balladry there is an impressive emotional depth to Imbruglia’s subject matter, which often finds her lovelorn and melancholy. However, on this heartbreak-themed album, her typically witty lyricism is still evident too, like on her lament to dating an older man, “I can handle a younger man with a house that’s a bit messy/The trade off is his skin has elasticity.” Importantly though, the laughs are not throwaway, but rather her acerbic humour creates shards of light that make the darker moments all the more touching.

Emotionally weighty and sad, with healthy doses of laughter just at the right times, the sarcastically-titled Lighter Side Of… is a really well rounded album, on which Imbruglia proves herself to be rather wonderful at telling evocative tales of everyday heartbreak.