Live Review: Nadia Reid, Stolen Violin

​The rare gimmick of there being no gimmick. Nadia Reid: voice, guitar, songs. Unadorned. Except for an occasional airing of an aridly dry New Zealand wit before diving back into songs of plain-spoken feeling.

By way of contrast was Stolen Violin. A multi-membered collective built around the twelve-string guitar meanderings of Jordan Ireland, formerly of the sadly under-realised The Middle East. Tonight they're a seven-piece reclining around the floor of the stage — not so much shoegaze as sockgaze, such is their relaxed demeanour. Instruments strewn about including autoharp, saxophone, tabla drums, and a guest violinist — replacing the stolen one? — running on nervous energy, with the whole racket just leaving the audience out a little too often. But they were enjoying themselves, lost in their own harmonics and interactions.

From that sprawl to a lone bespectacled woman in RM Williams boots, hair pinned up certainly more in function than fashion. Nadia Reid's songs are often introduced with the skeleton of a back story — the "gnarly" winds of Wellington airport becoming the basis of Runway's attempt to escape. She muses on this first proper Australian tour: it's all "lovely", although Perth is "…just a bit McLeod's Daughters".

But it all comes back to her voice. Utterly plaintive, nearly hymnal, as she loses Track Of The Time. Revealing she's nearly got a second album done, of "happier times" than the melancholy that seemed to underscore restrained emotions of Listen To Formation, Look For The Signs. "Yeah, I'm writing love songs again," she admits, kind of shyly.

But it's the "bad choices" of Just To Feel Alive, and a respectful reading of Gillian Welch's Elvis Presley Blues that encouraged enough applause for a final Some Are Lucky. And again, you just get lost in that voice. Nadia Reid is a special, absolutely human, talent.