Live Review: Jen Cloher, Miss Blanks, Sweater Curse

It's no surprise that Melbourne-based singer-songwriter Jen Cloher is supported by two younger Brisbane artists tonight, considering the Australian musician's reputation for championing home-grown music.

Indie-rock three-piece Sweater Curse seem a little nervous as the first musicians on stage this evening, but the band's youthful energy is quickly channelled into an earnest and endearing performance. The two bass- and guitar-wielding singers trade vocals and harmonise with each other over fuzzy guitar riffs, although it's the drummer's open-handed technique that proves the most captivating.

However, Brisbane rapper Miss Blanks is impossible to ignore. She's obviously not been chosen as an opener due to any aesthetic similarities with Cloher's music and, for this reason, her presence seems one of the most striking decisions of the night. Strutting and pacing around the stage, she's a confident performer, rapping along with her backing tracks and encouraging the crowd to "get it popping".

While it takes some time for the reserved audience to come around to Miss Blanks, there's a restless sense of anticipation that greets Jen Cloher as she takes the stage. Her three-piece band this evening - consisting of long-time drummer Jen Sholakis, bassist Bones Sloane and her partner Courtney Barnett on guitar - are dressed in various shades and styles of black, their nondescript clothing drawing attention to Cloher's songwriting as she opens the set with Regional Echo. The song features some distinctly Australian poetry and the influence of poets like Les Murray and Dorothy Porter can be heard in her lyrics as she evokes the qualities of the suburban sprawl in fetid detail, singing of prawns marinating in wheelie bins and dead bats hanging from power lines.

The band sound every bit as scrappy and dissonant as songs like Forgot Myself, Shoegazers and Analysis Paralysis require, although it's Barnett's screeching guitar melody throughout the long tail of Sensory Memory that transcends, due in no small part to the song's gradual build from a lonely guitar strum into a streamlined cacophony of distortion.

Toothless Tiger, Stone Age Brain and Fear Is Like A Forest are back-catalogue highlights, distinctly poppier than her recent work, which she returns to with Great Australian Bite. The song is simultaneously a love letter to Australian music and a condemnation of the industry's failure to support its musicians. She follows it with another equally personal and political statement, shredding the guitar during Strong Woman.

She dedicates an acoustic encore performance of Dark Art to Jet Black Cat Music owner Shannon Logan, before inviting the band back to finish the set with Name In Lights. "There's nothing left to say, my words are anti-sounds," she sings, before the letting the music speak for itself.