Avalanche City – Mercury Theatre (Concert Review)

The billing of last night’s Avalanche City show wasn’t entirely fair. My ticket said “Avalanche City with Benny Tipene,” but asThe 13th Floor arrived at Auckland’s Mercury Theatre — the show had originally been booked for one of the Town Hall’s smaller chambers, but ticket sales had impressed the promoters so much that they moved the show south of K Road to a slightly larger, and much lovelier, venue — the age of many audience members, who were being dropped off by parents who were heard to ask “what time does Benny finish, then,” suggested that a large number of the 350 of seats at the Mercury were filled by Tipene fans.

Tipene, known to his fans as a third-place runner-up in The X Factor, is much more a guitarist than a singer. But he chose to go down the talent-show route, where singing is prized much more highly than anything as mundane as playing an instrument, and performers need to be kept firmly in easy-to-understand pigeonholes. As a result, many of Tipene’s earlier songs, the TV-friendly ones that have “X Factor” stamped all over them, come off as a poor man’s Ed Sheeran. But that would be to do him little justice. While it’s true that he does have that rather uninteresting “I really wish I could be Jack Johnson” air about him when he plays the formulaically-delicate fingerpicking songs, the numbers he announced as “another new song” showed a lot more potential. Tipene’s signature guitar style — muted barre chords chopped out in a pleasingly stompy rhythm — suits his ultimately slightly underwhelming voice much better than the intricate picking of the slow songs. He might have been the main draw for much of the audience, but while he has it in him to become a fine guitarist — he can, undeniably, play — as a singer he played a perfectly pleasant, sweet, but ultimately unremarkable half-hour.

Avalanche City, at first, gave every indication of not raising the bar considerably higher. Dave Baxter, the owner of one of Auckland’s finest beards and who is, to all intents and purposes, the entire population of Avalanche City, could almost, for his first few songs, have been Benny Tipene with a backing band. He has a pleasant but not an exceptional voice; he can play guitar perfectly well; he writes a decent song. But there was, as the show began, little especially remarkable about last night’s performance, a rather static performer standing almost at the back of the stage and singing. I sharpened my pencil, ready to write an enjoyably scathing review.

But then something — I’m still not quite sure what — changed. The exact moment Baxter changed gear isn’t entirely clear, but I suspect it was when he sat down, acoustic guitar swapped for an oddly un-overdriven Les Paul, and his backing band — “they’re a luxury tonight; when I play overseas it’s usually just me and my guitar, like this” — stepped away from their instruments to provide discreet backing vocals for Wild Places. At last, I got it. This was a beautiful song, expertly performed. Then, rather bravely, he called his support act back on the stage. When your opener’s as popular with the audience as Benny Tipene had been, this is a risky move — you have to be confident that you’re not about to lose your audience to your support. But it worked. Baxter and Tipene played Feist’s The Park to great effect; they do, indeed, make quite the double act, their guitars blending together as effectively as their voices. The rest of Avalanche City for the night — Stephen Thomas on drums, Ben Deveray on keys, trumpeter and xylophonist Song Jin and, as he obligingly noted on a set-list at the end of the show for me, David Love on “guitar, etc” — joined the two singers for The Streets, the song, Baxter told us, that Tipene had wanted to play on The X Factor before the producers made him play Love Love Love. So Baxter last night gave him the chance to play his favourite song, and the show was the better for it.Love Love Love, the big single and the title track from Avalanche City’s 2011 debut album, bounced along with more energy than anything else we’d heard last night; the audience approved. The set closed with Rabbit, a quite wonderfully powerful song that built almost imperceptibly from an delicate intro to a glorious noise. No encore, though — Baxter had already told us he wasn’t going to bother with that nonsense.

Avalanche City played a very short set — a little over an hour, it was over long before ten, perhaps to avoid going past the bedtimes of many in the audience. After the show, however, both Baxter and his band and Tipene came down into the foyer of the Mercury Theatre for photos and autographs. I’d had my misgivings toward the start of the performance, but when I shook Baxter’s hand and told him “great show tonight,” I really did mean it.

Steve McCabe

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Set lists:

Benny Tipene:

Song Two

Lanterns

Sweet Life

Not Good For Me

Blueberry

Lonely

Trunks

Boxes

Step On Up

Make You Mine

 

Avalanche City:

I Need You

The Midnight

Drive On

Inside out

Little Fire

Fault Lines

Wild Places I

Wild Places II

Don’t Fall Asleep

Giving Me A Sign

The Park

The Streets

Love Love Love

Keep Finding A Way

Rabbit