Live Review: Martha Marlow, Luke Howard

Walking into the timber interior of the Melbourne Recital Centre, it’s immediately apparent that Martha Marlow boasts a wider demographic fanbase than any other 2021 Australian Music Prize nominee. The Sydney-based singer-songwriter’s album Medicine Man, most of which she plays this evening, is a curiously timeless release, and its lush evocation of seventies-era orchestral folk-pop has found appreciative listeners among entwined young couples and, it would seem, people who bought orchestral folk-pop records in the 1970s.

Tonight’s opening act, a man in his early 40s, walks on stage, picks up a microphone and immediately begins talking about the influence of Camus on his next album, All Of Us. “This first song is called A Collective Destiny,” he says, placing the microphone carefully on the top of a Steinway grand piano and taking a seat before it. 

Speaking on behalf of an audience largely unaware that there would be any support act, a woman shouts, “Who are you?” It turns out the man about to bedazzle us with minimalist classical piano for the next thirty minutes, is Luke Howard. Rocking slowly back and forth on the edge of a piano stool, Howard peels out arpeggios and rolling chords in a way that evokes movement in nature, a subtly shifting view from a window and other imagery that likely varies between listeners. It’s beguiling stuff that is probably already leavening Spotify playlists with names like ‘Rainy Afternoon’ and ‘Chill Piano’ and should rightfully be all over a very successful film soundtrack sometime soon.

Keeping the idea of refinement and precision foremost in the mind of the audience, Marlow’s 17-piece orchestra took their places, then her band, all of whom appeared on her album. The next person to grace the stage is iconic composer and conductor Nigel Westlake. Bowing and accepting the applause appropriate for the man who scored the film Babe, Westlake then welcomes Martha Marlow, who is being led by her father, the double bassist and arranger Jonathan Zwartz, to its centre. Resplendent in a white silk dress, she sits on a stool, keeping one foot on the floor, and puts on glasses to read lyrics from a music stand.

“I’d like to begin the show with the first song from my album Medicine Man,” Marlow intones evenly in a voice that is part ASMR hypnotist, part news broadcaster. Most songs are introduced with a reading of a specific poem that influenced or inspired it. The first, All My Days, is preceded by a reading of Mary Oliver’s I Go Down To The Shore and further contextualised by Marlow sharing a story about walking to the beach near her house and how the soul-stirring sight of apricot sunsets over rolling waves inspired the song. Many of these poetry readings meet with equally earnest murmurs of appreciation in the audience and it is quietly astonishing, in 2022, to see a performer so earnestly in love with beauty and so passionate about sharing it without a shred of naivety or irony. And then comes the music.

Perhaps it is due to recent years spent listening to digital reconstructions of acoustic or electronic recordings, but the impact of hearing an orchestra and a band performing is almost shocking. With so much attention paid to the writing, arrangement, performance and the live sound, other music seems temporarily weaker. The sincerity with which Marlow writes and sings is similarly remarkable.

“I called the album Medicine Man because I haven’t been very well, I’m not very well,” she explains by way of introducing the title track, a highlight of the show. “This album is very much an insight into my inner world I take refuge in.” Marlow suffers from an autoimmune disorder that fluctuates in its expression. Tonight it means she is unable to play guitar, but her condition never seems to be a source of weakness. Instead, it seems to charge each action with intent and purpose. 

Moving through the album, songs are rendered with a rich fidelity to their recording. Violins shimmer in unison, guitars blend together with a fulsome warmth that anchors her voice in their midst. Unaffected, breathy and floating, plain and striking, it’s a sound that is all the more powerful for not being showy, sinking into the arrangements as another instrument. Songs such as Rain Man (introduced with a reading of TS Eliot’s Rhapsody On A Windy Night) and River Runs Red (inspired by Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart) are rife with imagery and sentiments that speak to nurture and support rather than assertions or declarations. They don’t need copious vibrato or to be separated from the song either in the writing, recording or performance to find their strength. It’s a privilege to be able to see them in a venue that allows their detail to be writ large.

Closing with the closest thing she has to an upbeat radio hit I Don’t Want To Grow Up, the revelatory Now I Have You, and What All The Fuss Is About, a song from a forthcoming “novel in song” called Notes From Malcolm Harvey, Marlow seems gloriously at home. The sheer grandeur of her vision, and its realisation, is intoxicating. Marlow leaves the stage to applause, and returns when the song has finished to a standing ovation. To have created a show like this from a debut album suggests there will be many more to come.