Swimming through a broth of thick Australian lilt,
The Jezabels' status as national treasures is tonight gloriously flagrant and while they may be beloved by a distant nation – albeit one with substantial cultural similarity – on this sort of evidence we too ought to treasure them so. The Sydney four-piece emerge from the wings; enshrouded in twilight; exuding the cocksure swagger of anyone to have ever aspired to entertain. For over the following hour that's precisely what they achieve as lead vocalist Hayley Mary squats and thrusts through the eagle-eyed melodrama of opener Endless Summer and beyond.
The luscious melancholia of A Little Piece then ensues, Telecaster toter Samuel Lockwood stamping furiously on a floorboard's worth of pedals like a quitting smoker scrunching the umpteenth last one irately on gravelled sidewalk, its every chorus blossoming like an unforeseen spring indebted to global warming. It's then on to Nobody Nowhere which, quite appositely, nobody nowhere has previously experienced live. Clattering and a little clumsy, the sheen of indulging in its debut is quickly wiped clean as it fails to sparkle in the shadowy void left in the backwash of such a brilliant opening brace. It's perhaps an essay to add an extra sprinkle of glitter to what is a quietly monumental and moreover special eve for those onstage, and yet although about as far from home as geographically feasible there's a warmth already within this regal theatre that precipitates the precipitation of Lord knows what from above. Emphatic, if occasionally awkward arm gestures toward perspiring ceilings and impeccable hooting and howling suggest that if any sense of trepidation has ever instilled itself within Mary, it's tonight allayed conclusively, flung from her being like a hoary dove released from the slitted window of some lofty tower. Indeed her confidence perhaps crescendoes during sweeping comber City Girl and moreover if her body's telling a story it's precisely thus: an inviting page-turner that twists with her every wild gyration.
Rosebud attests to The Jezabels' arena-shaped aspirations to effectively inhabit stadia and inspires a concerted mania from barrier to bar while Mace Spray epitomises to all extensive purposes the construction of a consummate live show as strategised spotlight routines scintillate like those in the recreation yard during an exceptionally well participated jailbreak. Its clunky floor tom thuddery; its enticing singalong chorus conceived of heys, yeahs, et cetera; its gradually ebbing grandiosity all ensure men, women, and children (over the age of fourteen, naturally) scale shoulders with hysteria resumed and the air of a waterlogged, probably windswept field sodden in music during a quintessentially British summer consequently subsumed. Periodically it all gets a little too pristine as on the meandering Sahara Mahala or the pedestrian drive of Deep Wide Ocean, the relatively low DB level soothing through speakers lending the sounds of debut full-length Prisoner an even greater FM aesthetic as the murmurs of clutters inhabiting outlying recesses intensify. The gallivanting vaudeville balladry of Hurt Me shifts attentions smoothly back into gear however, galvanising the throng as Mary entreats you "maybe pat me on the back when you're able" before they recede only to reemerge for an encore of Dark Storm predetermined by a dotted line strewn across the width of a setlist. Its deep guitar-led groove and Mary's blackened vox combine to throw up a Yeah Yeah Yeahs effect that's appropriately all kinds of "yeah"; a conclusion to have us snaking up and down NW1 in anxious desperation to thwack all four backs up there. For The Jezabels stimulate international delirium through the medium of unabashed pop and guilty pleasure yet all self-reproach is here corroded away by a great communal infatuation rendering all delectation entirely shameless.
