Live Review: Jinjer, Kittie @ Festival Hall, Melbourne

Slight whinge to start with — I’m not sure why there was no local support for this tour; a Reliqa, Future Static, Aurateque, The Last Martyr, RedHook etc. could have slotted in very nicely on the front end of this line-up. And that’s just a selection of Aussie female-fronted bands - of course, it didn’t strictly have to be that way. Strike it down to an opportunity lost.

Anyway, now that’s out of the way . . . 

In this humble scribe and fan’s opinion, the steady increase in female participation in globally recognised heavy music acts has been one of the best trends in the style this century. That being the case, it must be said that Kittie, who hail from that hotbed of musical expression known as Canada, are true trailblazers. They’ve been around for literally decades, and tonight they show us why (apparently, it’s been something like thirteen years since they’ve toured Australia, which blows the mind a little.)

Women in heavy rock and metal are an increasingly regularly seen phenomenon today, but such was definitely not the case in the mid-nineties when they formed. They were well ahead of their time.

For the uninitiated, this all-female band smash out old-school, mostly four-on-the-floor heavy rock to metal with vim, vigour, vitality, and a joyously rough-around-the-edges aesthetic. And it sounds enormous in the cavernous open atmosphere of Festival Hall, the grand old dame of the Melbourne music scene.

The decades this four-piece have spent on the road together really shows: while their style is raw and ready, as a live unit, they lock in tight, punching together like a finely tuned engine, displaying a tightness that’s only possibly after years and years of hard grind on the road.

Mainstays of the band since its inception, sisters Morgan and Mercedes Lander, clearly have that indefinable sibling connection musically (in a similar way the Van Halen brothers and Vinnie and Dimebag did), the former handling the melodic cleans and banshee screeches, as well as rhythm guitar duties, with equal aplomb, the latter laying down the percussive grooves with thunderous abandon.

To either side of them, Tara McLeod and Ivy Jenkins lock in beautifully on lead guitar and bass, respectively, and together, Kittie give a totally slammin’, in-your-face set, forty-five minutes of feminine thunder and attitude.

This band gives the impression that they would be equally at home, sonically and performance-wise, in a big hall or an intimate, sweaty pub/club. 

As an opener, this band really sticks the landing, and the Festival Hall throng is now ready for the main event. 

Like Lorna Shore last week, Ukraine’s Jinjer have much hype circulating around them. And like Lorna Shore, they are worth every last skerrick of that hype, as shown by their recorded works (their brand new album, Duel, is quite superb) and now their live show (this is actually this band’s second foray Down Under.)

This is a band in absolute command of their art and in absolute command of several forms of musical/artistic expression – the overarching tone of the band is uncompromisingly heavy, but at the same time, they know how to jazz, they know how to groove, they know how to ‘core, they know how to thrash, they know how to prog (and plenty more besides) and they do it all in their stride, filling the hall with a massive wall of sound and dazzling with their visual performance. 

A few words on the band’s dynamic powerhouse of a singer, Tatiana Shmayluk. She is a warrior, a pint-sized titan of a frontwoman, with an enormous voice, an enormous presence, and an eye and ear-catching style that commands absolute attention as she sings and screams like her very life depends on it and stalks the stage like a lioness stalking her prey.

Behind her, the band, three stellar musicians, lock in with both flair and discipline in equal measures, and the four-piece dazzle and beguile us with a seventy-minute set proper, plus an extremely popular encore, arguably their best-known song Pisces. 

Jinjer are a unique voice in heavy music. They get lumped in with the ‘metalcore’ crowd, and while, as stated, they can certainly do metalcore, they are way, way more than a ‘mere’ metalcore band. They are a band of many, many facets, and they blend it all seamlessly into one highly cohesive whole. 

Their homeland may have had much turmoil foisted upon it by aggressive and maniacal outside forces, but this band shows that the people of Ukraine are unbowed, and will continue to live and express themselves regardless.