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Live: Mary Lorson & Billy Coté
Borderline, London

Live Review
2-2-2003
SashaS

 

Mary Lorson & Billy Coté delight ‘lost souls’

It used to be claimed that the best gigs were found in the dingy, smoky, subterranean dives in side-alleys. Those days are gone – it can be brightly painted, air-con taking care of smoke and perspiring but there are goodies still gracing its stage/s. Mary Lorson and Billy Coté, partners/parents in real life and an extraordinary creative couple served one last night.

Borderline offered a perfect setting for this minimalist performance of two guitars and occasional keyboards by Lorson, a recital in essence, an event of the very close kind. Not only because they were so near one could lean over turn off an amp, but because of the intimate nature of their music, the deeply emotive scopes, often peopled by intriguing characters.

One thing that was overpowering during the night is the total earnestness of the show. The two communicate with each other, discuss which song to play, tell little stories and change their minds about addressing something mid-sentence. None of the over-rehearsals and choreography to make it a uniformed experience, be it Belgium (where they played the night before), Sydney or London. Today’s shows have become like a chain of hotels, familiar to lessen the blues feeling of ‘away-from-home’.

Lorson and Coté’s artistry is on the pensive, melancholic and, often, depressing side although it still manages to be uplifting, it is not all doom’n’gloom. These are the fellow lost-souls who have always looked for analytical approach, disclosures, professions, meanings and answers, as every artist should. (How many are there, really?) Their music is not only a chronicle of ache we call life, a notebook of situations and emotions but songs of beauty, spirit, substance and solace.

This twosome’s musical journey started a dozen of years ago in the form of Madder Rose; upon the disintegration of the band Lorson emerged as a songwriter and songstress in her own right with Saint Low while Coté preferred to remain on the fringes with experimental-cum-jazzy ‘Amateur Soul Surgery’ album of 2001. Thus, over the last several years Lorson’s become more creatively active and this is more of her show than Coté’s who happily sat at one end of the stage and kept a firm eye on his frets with a very few remarks aimed at the adoring audience.

The tracks played tonight included a very early Madder Rose composition from “The first Bush-Gulf war,” Lorson wryly commented, via ‘Tragic Magic’ and Saint Low albums to the current, mostly instrumental, ‘Piano Creeps’ selection. Lorson sings like an angel hovering over a snow-set scene, clearing a path to emo-meltdown. Dressed in all-black with matching hair, she sounded darkly passionate, low, effervescent, heart-rending, intimate and looked like an alternative ‘prima-dame’.

I drove back home singing happily, in a stone-deaf key, after this eve of ‘musique noir’.

 


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