Juliet McLean is a songwriter and voice who can quietly mesmerize a Wine Cellar audience with songs which navigate the peaks and troughs in matters of the heart.
Where does it come from? A novelist’s eye for narrative and telling details. Influences lurk in the background like ghosts and manifest themselves when called upon.
Love Remains has the Velvet Underground drone quietly building on a spectral song about how times may change but love can be a constant. That’s the gentle Folkie third album, think Pale Blue Eyes and Jesus.
Mclean is from New Plymouth, the home of WOMAD and World music. She teaches music and performance at high schools and has been involved with the celebrated music festival since its inception in Taranaki.
She says this is her first headline show in Auckland, although she did play out in the wild west Boganville of Kumeu last year, on the back of the newly minted EP Amaze Me.
That was produced by Ben King (Goldenhorse) and he is accompanying her tonight on guitar and harmony vocals.
She starts solo with keyboards as she plays Overlooked. This is sophisticated Folk Jazz and while it will remind you of Canadian Joni, the phrasing also borrows something from Sinatra in his Sings for Only the Lonely period.
Comfortable Sorrow follows and you notice the sound from the desk is superlative tonight. It handles the light and the shade. The voice is always prominent with guitar and keyboards restrained.
Leaving Copper Mountain possibly borrows a little from Dusty in Memphis (1968) with its air of Americana and Soul. Both songs are from the Unlash the Boats (2019) album.
Amaze Me is the great title song off her last EP, which sounds so much like classic Richard & Linda Thompson. The guitar weaves out some Eastern tones to complement, and with McLean’s vocal, the effect is mesmerising.
Burnt Out is stripped back and naked, as in the emotions are laid bare. Eighteen seemed older then. That is a more succinct way of expressing what Dylan was trying to say when he sang, I was so much older then/ I’m much younger than that, now.
There is a detachment from the observer until you hear Bonfires, tied to the stake/ Lucifer played his part/ Secrets lead to hell. Then the intensity and passion rise.
Helpless and Through and Through. A nice Country Folk sound with super harmony vocals.
This is Our Love is both soothing and sensual. The guitar tastefully underplays and adds colour throughout the show, but here the ringing tones fire up the passion as McLean sings, I kiss your silvery tongue.
Loves a Reckoning closes the evening. A slow start again but spells are cast, singing about night spent kissing starry-eyed girls.
Juliet McLean is clearly a technically gifted singer. Match that with a novelist or poets’ sensibility to writing and you have a special artist.
Rev Orange Peel
