Even Björk would find My Brightest Diamond weird.
Walking onstage in a multi-coloured costume with fluffy felt balls attached to it in every place you can imagine, Shara Worden is wearing a dramatic mask that resembles a happy Japanese sumo wrestler. She holds up her two woven oven-mitt gloves with a plus sign on one, and a minus sign on the other, as she crab-walks onstage in full pantomime mode.
The crowd doesn’t know how to react to the recent mother who counts Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens, The National and The Decemberists as jam-buddies, as she stands there, like a bad street performer miming god-knows-what to the audience in front of her.
It’s hard to imagine the serious, contemplative Bryce Dessner in the studio with what looks like an eccentric grade 3 art teacher on acid. Removing her oven-mitts, she picks up a ukulele from the ground and begins wooing the crowd with ‘We Added It Up’. There are not many artists that can lead the crowd in a harmonised a’cappella on their first song of the evening, but this crowd is devoted and they sound amazing, choir voices and all.
We (claiming credit!) do so well at providing the gospel backing vocals that Ms. Worden loses her train of thought and, caught up in wonder, forgets her lyrics – breaking into a fit of laughter before her drummer reminds her how to finish her song.
Talk about an icebreaker: pantomime, ukeleles, sing-a-longs and an on-stage faux pas; and it’s only the first track.
She brushes off her lyrical fumblings, “I was thinking about how happy I was…” Exhibit A in evidence of aforementioned acid use. In what would be telling of the breadth of talent in My Brightest Diamond this evening, Worden swaps her uke for an electric guitar, and with no bass in sight, starts violently strumming the opening notes of ‘Golden Star’, changing the hippie love-fest ambience for a darker, sexier tone.
The sugary sweet Regina Spektor high-notes are replaced by mid-’90s Polly Jean Harvey howls as she thrashes her guitar up against drummer Brian Wolf, her sole on-stage accompaniment
This transformation from a delicate finger-picking flower to a raging tour-de-force would become one constant metamorphosis throughout the night, indicative of a woman who is undoubtedly a bit of a musical genius. She also might be clinically insane, but that’s for the doctors to worry about.
‘Escape Routes’ utilises a harpsichord to hold court, carrying herself with the same ethereal delicacy as Joanna Newsom. When lulling the crowd to sleep with lullabies, My Brightest Diamond looks so fragile she could blow over in the wind.
The crowd is deathly silent, entranced by a woman whose voice leaves contemporaries gasping for air. Florence Welsh has nothing on this woman, but this is no stab at The Machine, few in modern music have been blessed with the strength and range Worden possesses, and in this acoustic moment, Jeff Buckley’s famous performance at Sin-é café springs to mind – she is simply that good.
Sadly, Our Brightest Diamond gives little in terms of crowd interaction to the packed Northcote Social Club (making the venue’s name a tad ironic). Any words directed at the crowd were kept to brief, and strange, one-liners. “Winter Is Coming!” She proclaimed, running around the stage throwing confetti out of a construction hard hat before launching into the progged up guitar masterpiece, ‘Magic Rabbit’.
A deliberately obscure Game of Thrones reference? Either way, it was palpably strange. Equally as surprising as the confetti, were the fifty balloons that were kicked into the crowd as Worden tuned her guitar before ‘Apples’, a track that stopped suddenly with the confession, “I feel like moving”, moving her mic over to the other side of the stage and restarting the track. But as unbelievable as such behaviour was, it only further enforces that she is a true artist, she doesn’t give a fuck about any convention in the rulebook; if she wants to move her mic mid-song, so be it.
A well received request from a crowd-member for her cover of Nina Simone’s jazz staple, ‘Feeling Good’ results in a rare airing of the track that Worden recorded for the Dark Was The Night compilation, and it is show-stopping.
There is a colloquialism about things being ‘jaw-dropping’ and then there is the odd occurrence when people are actually staring at the performer in a trance with their jaw being dragged to the ground by gravity. Unfortunate then, that she should feel the need to finish her set with quite an unimaginative re-take on Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’.
A paint-by numbers cover, sounding more like an acoustic band at your local pub, that sadly only detracted from the set pinnacle that preceded it. Leaving the stage for less than twenty seconds, My Brightest Diamond and My Dapper Drummer return for a one song encore; performing ‘Freak Out’, which you can probably guess from the title, gave Shara Worden one last opportunity to show us what she was made of: all kinds of crazy.
– Chris Lewis
