Live Review: HOWQUA, Rob Taylor, Dylan Wright

It seems almost a shame to have to tell you about Hibernian House. It would be great if a venue like this could be kept secret, to be left for you to discover on your own. It feels like an anomaly in Sydney’s structured, nanny state environment and more akin to art collectives in Berlin or neo-hippie communes in San Francisco. It’s a simple space, one that MTV’s Unplugged would’ve spent countless dollars trying to craft, one that erases the line between performer and audience. Its relative anonymity keeps capacity issues at bay. It’s a nest that people can hide in, perched high above the street, and one that hopefully remains that way.

On Saturday it hosted three acoustic acts, the first being Dylan Wright, a young performer from the Southern beaches of Sydney. A voice like honey, a ponytail as slick and clean as a silk scarf and a bright-eyed approach to songwriting all gave him clear advantages but, like the headliner HOWQUA, there was a lack of depth that meant that his short set was actually the right length before the thematic well likely ran dry. His wry Superfreak cover was the high water mark.

Rob Taylor of local duo Wolf Tide came next with a set that stretched our patience. His strange, mumbled delivery cut with bursts of warped yelping was almost impossible to decipher. Content was lost, leaving us with the music itself, which, as it turns out, was ok.

Third act and headliner HOWQUA earns credit for sheer earnestness. Writing this review seems almost perfunctory. It’s doubtful if any critical response matters to this guy past people he cares about and his audience, who are so disarmed by his starry-eyed melancholia, his stellar vocal talent and his delicate guitar-plucking to notice the almost complete absence of thematic complexity. It doesn’t feel right to comment on such naked honesty and sincerity and humanity with anything but a shy thumbs up.