Live Review: Matthew E White

Matthew E White and his seven-piece band took graciously to the stage amid Stevie Wonder's Jesus Children Of America and set up a one-night residency of big sounds and communal singing. The frontman armed with his archtop guitar was half gentle giant, half the son of God himself, with a bushy beard and long locks reaching past his shoulders.

From the opening song, Will You Love Me, White's fragile vocals wove a gentle web of intrigue. From the centre of the park, the vocal mix was too soft but when each song built up to a crashing wall-of-sound finale and White let his lungs open up, there was a passion and yearning to his voice that was perfectly suited to his experimental mix of soul, blues and ambience.

Show highlights included the trombone solo on the dirty blues cover of Neil Young's Are You Ready For The Country? and the adorable sidestep jig that the whole band performed during Steady Pace. The band, replete with brass section, keyboards and both drums and percussion, played long sets that delved into dissonance and syncopation with Motown-sounding piano trills and a spacey, mellow percussion jam on Big Love that ended with White throwing down his shaker and blasting into a passionate crescendo-fuelled guitar solo.  

White is a storyteller and warned the audience that once you get him talking, he won't stop. He told stories from his beloved hometown Richmond, Virginia and about the time he stalked his hero Randy Newman in Los Angeles before launching into a sparse performance of Newman's Sail Away.

For the last two songs, plucked from his debut album Big Inner, White invited a whole host of musician friends from the audience up on stage as a kind of makeshift choir for a hypnotic, gospel rendition of Brazos. It was an all-inclusive, familial performance and the repeated line, “Jesus Christ is our Lord/Jesus Christ, He is your friend” resonated both eerily and comfortingly around the theatre.

The art-filled lyric booklet dispersed to White's crowd says: “Any joy that listening to tonight's performance may bring can only be captured in memories and two-dimensional duplications,” and he's right, you had to be there, but know that White is pushing all the right boundaries and that Sydney will keep those memories locked tight for a long time to come.