Live Review: Lisa Mitchell

Local duo Georgia Fair kicked things off with Where You Been? and proceeded to draw liberally from their All Through Winter album, punctuating the set with newer tracks – Gloria and the clarinet-infused The River. When not attending to singing duties – and there's plenty of them, each song draped in harmonies as main vocalist Jordan Wilson does a clenched-jaw Northern Beaches take on Dylan – the duo seem more content to play to and at one another than the crowd. A tight performance that lacked bite, it was as polite as the duo told the audience they had been.

Lisa Mitchell live has never quite been up to the same calibre as her recorded output. This is not necessarily a negative thing, but they are different beasts. Gone is the sheen and polish of the studio (there's a fumbled run on the piano here and a wrong chord struck on the guitar there) and in its place is a mesmerising, fallible, almost apologetically real talent. With all the fidgeting, the tucking of hair and the confusion of where to put her hands when she sings unadorned by guitar, there's a quaintness and awkwardness that makes you wonder how she ever made it out of the circlejerk of televised talent contests unscathed and an aura and voice that makes you stop wondering and continue just being grateful that you are, in such heavenly surrounds, able to witness it.

She opened with a poem, John Burrough's Leaf And Tendril, and later performed a cover of a Sanskrit chant she learned in yoga class, feeling the need between all that to tell us she hadn't become a new-age hippy. But as she flits about stage, falls off piano stools, or stands sans-mic, eyes closed and wailing centre stage – all the while singing a mix of sweet and sultry – she seems a little like these 'new-age hippies' she's distanced herself from. Just like the line in one of tonight's crowd favourites, a fast-paced and full-band Neopolitan Dreams, she's never '100 per cent in the room'; the music takes her elsewhere.

By the same token, aided only by Melbourne a capella trio Aluka when the band is not on stage, Mitchell takes us out of the room with tender performances of Diamond In The Rough and Love Letter, with a rollicking run of Oh! Hark!, full band in tow, to end the encore.