Her music documents her life in the spotlight. Model, Actress, Whatever speaks to the highs and lows of fame. Blackout Drunk talks about the messiness of infidelity spurred by the party lifestyle. It’s easy to understand how her indie-pop prowess draws comparisons to Mazzy Star, as sultry ballad On This Love brings out the huskiness in her voice.
A member of the audience screams her name enthusiastically throughout the show, often followed by indecipherable affirmations. At one point Waterhouse tries to interact with them to clarify their message, to which they don’t respond, and she jokingly responds, “They’ve gone quiet.”
Some fans flew in from interstate to see her, video calling friends and family members throughout the show. A Sydney-based fan is brought onstage to be serenaded with Johanna.
Waterhouse somehow manages to transmit “quintessential cool girl in the bar” energy in her stage persona with a down-to-earth personality. She utters a humble appreciation to her fans for making her feel “so good” and “so loved”.
She’s one to watch as she cements her career in music.
Reviewed by Vyshnavee Wijekumar
MUSIC | Rising festival
Japanese Breakfast ★★★★
PICA, June 5
“It’s so cold here! What’s going on?” says Michelle Zauner, driving force behind indie darlings Japanese Breakfast. Yes, it’s cold in Melbourne right now, and especially in PICA, a big empty shed in Port Melbourne with uneven concrete floors and unlit portaloos. Everyone’s wearing massive coats and basking in our collective body heat, while cursing our friends at the Jessica Pratt show in the warm, acoustically luxuriant recital hall.
Michelle Zauner and Japanese Breakfast in full flight at PICA.Credit: Martin Philbey
But I’m at a Japanese Breakfast show and thrilled about it. It’s been eight years since they last visited, and since then, they’ve put out the breakthrough hit album Jubilee and this year’s literate, almost baroque For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), and Zauner has written a bestselling memoir, Crying in H Mart. She writes songs dense with emotion and pathos, and performs them irresistibly.
The six-piece opens with three songs from the new album, all dripping with Zauner’s great lyrics and the band’s rich instrumentation. She’s in a frilly shirt and torn tights. Saxophone dances with flute as the lights play with the stage smoke. “The breeze carries salt / And sipping milky broth / He cast his gaze towards the sea out / The Winnebago,” she sings on Orlando in Love. It’s dreamlike.
The sound bounces around indie genres. Honey Water leans into shoegaze. Slide Tackle – which she introduces with a cry of “No more melancholy!” – plays with disco. The guitar finger slide comes out for the country-tinged Men In Bars, with drummer Craig Hendrix sharing the vocals, a part originally performed by Jeff Bridges.
Throughout, Zauner’s voice is so expressive and full of intent, and her presence is tirelessly warm and breezy. She introduces Winter in LA as being about “being miserable in lovely places”, a contrast that could apply to the whole set.
It may have been a cold Melbourne night, but there was nowhere else Japanese Breakfast’s fans wanted to be.Credit: Martin Philbey
It’s not easy to tour to Australia in the ’20s. As Zauner tells us, it’s so far away and expensive (“It is expensive!” someone validates from the crowd). But even with high overheads, Zauner wasn’t skimping on the massive gong at the back of the stage, used only for the chorus of Paprika in the encore. Correct decision.
Closing out the night is a spread from across her career: Paprika and the bubblegum pop of Be Sweet, debut album classic Everybody Wants to Love You, and the cruising psych-rock of Diving Woman.
Reviewed by Will Cox
DANCE | Rising festival
Kill Me ★★★
Southbank Theatre, until June 8
It’s said that all bad art is the result of good intentions. So what about great art – is it sometimes the result of bad ones? Self-serving, manipulative, maybe even a little cruel? Argentinian choreographer and dancer Marina Otero doesn’t answer that question, but she does ask it – loudly, shamelessly and with plenty of self-mythologising flair.
Kill Me is showing as part of the Rising festival. Credit: Mariano Barrientos
Otero tells us at the beginning of Kill Me that she had originally wanted to make a show about love, obsession, narcissism and delusion. About her ex-boyfriend, in fact. But who would fund that? No one, apparently. So she rebranded it as a show about mental illness. And look at her now: mad, bad and in high demand.
She is joined for the ride by four women, who remain naked throughout the show, and each gets the chance to share their experiences of psychic instability. Then there’s the marvellous Tomás Pozzi, cast as the reincarnation of Nijinsky. His rendition of Petrushka – all frantic hops and crushed velvet – is at once ridiculous and oddly moving.
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There’s a lot of talk in Kill Me. Some of it’s serious, some of it’s not. It’s hard to know how deep the cynicism runs. The show is an undeniably entertaining medley of dance, music, monologue and sight gags, veering between raw confession and theatrical excess, but there’s an atmosphere of unreality to it all.
In a self-lacerating speech near the end, Otero lists her regrets: professional compromises, bad choices, a misspent life. Theatre doesn’t change anything, she concludes. So what does it matter if the intentions are good or bad? What does it matter if it’s true or not, so long as it’s fun?
That’s what makes her declaration of support for the people of Palestine at the end of the show so unexpected. Sincere, no doubt, and possibly spontaneous, but dramaturgically at odds with everything around it. Stranger still, she follows it with a half-hearted singalong to Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball. Once again, it’s the wrong song, completely the wrong song.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann
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