Live Review: Sarah Blasko, Cameron Avery

Perth's Cameron Avery rides the fine line between classic and cliche with varying results. He is a confident and intermittently charismatic performer, oscillating between a keyboard and his Silvertone semi-acoustic guitar. Songs like Dance With Me and Big Town Girl demonstrate his strong voice's decent range. Avery is quite compelling to watch and much of the audience seem thoroughly charmed by him, but too many of his crooning ballads are marred by trite lyrics.

Sarah Blasko begins this Melbourne date of her first ever solo tour with a striking A Capella rendition of Down On Love. She's wearing long, frilly white sleeves which flail as she gesticulates. Blasko can really sing, so it's a true pleasure to hear her do just that, completely unadorned. Sitting now at a grand piano, she applies her smokey, velvety voice to the brooding, assertive I Awake.

Blasko says she "feels like a kid" being alone onstage. She does appear to be enjoying herself as she flits between guitar, piano and, at one point, ukulele. She is not a virtuosic player of any of these instruments, but no one came tonight to see piano noodling or guitar shredding. These are faithful, unfussy versions of her songs with fairly rudimentary arrangements, just the chords played simply to support and accentuate her stunning vocals.

On the songs where her voice is accompanied only by a few plucked guitar notes - Woman By The Well and Is My Baby Yours? - Blasko's ethereal voice sounds particularly otherworldly. You almost suspect at these moments that she must be lip-syncing, because how can that sound just be coming out of a person's face?

The programmed, synthetic beats of a promising new song (probable title: Phantom Heartbeat) remind us that she is, in fact, a pop singer, albeit a particularly nuanced and mature one. More familiar songs like We Won't Run and I Wanna Be Your Man become unexpectedly poignant when stripped back to their bare bones. All I Want also benefits immensely from this treatment, as the longing it contains is brought to the fore.

For her penultimate song, Blasko treats the audience to her tenderly transcendent cover of Cold Chisel's Flame Trees. She closes with Perfect Now, a song from her first album which doesn't quite reach the heights of much of what came before, but rounds out her set on a beautifully understated note.