Live Review: Tash Sultana

Brisbane's beloved Tivoli is packed with music lovers from all walks of life, but all seem to be wearing their best denim jackets. As the lights darken, hundreds of phones are raised to capture Australia's premier looping artist Tash Sultana walk on stage, who is clearly humbled by the warm welcome from the adoring, sold-out crowd.

Her signature raised platform — featuring tiered keyboards, dual microphones, an impressive rack of guitars and plenty of percussion pads — shakes from her body movements as the one-woman band immediately sets about building a delay-rich, reggae soundscape.

While her debut EP Notion gives you a taste of her ability to craft complex soundscapes across instruments, her live renditions of her atmospheric alternative-pop tracks are simply intoxicating. It's impossible to not become lost in Sultana's beat-boxed grooves, plethora of guitar tones and layers, and her manual use of a harmonising and octave vocal effect.

At times the set sounds more like a rock show as Sultana's guitar work descends into piping hot riffs and headbanging interludes, making the crowd instinctively bop in sync with her flailing dreadlocks.

However, Gemini showcases Sultana's more delicate songwriting approaches — entrancing the crowd with dreamy, warbling synthesisers and angelic melodies, including an astounding a capella rendition of the second verse. The trace is only broken when Sultana whips out a trumpet and unleashes a stirring solo atop the heavenly soundscape.

As the adoring crowd once again gives her a thunderous applause, Sultana humbly explains how just a few years ago she played to no one in Brisbane. "I started from, like, the fucking bottom, and now I'm planning on heading up in a... graceful pace."

Sultana's recently released single Murder To The Mind evokes a rare singalong and plenty of dancing, in response to the sultry grooves and intriguing instrumentation.

Unfortunately, the chitter-chatter of young drunks muffles the quieter sections of Sultana's ensuing stripped-back ballads, which, when audible, are refreshingly simple in their composition. She may be best known for her atmospheric looping, but her voice's range and its fiery, emotive timbre is by far the most striking of her many talents.

Notion, featuring mandolin and pan flute solos, once again evokes some slow dancing from the crowd, but the most significant crowd response of the night is to her breakthrough single Jungle. The Tivoli fills with hundreds of voices that drown out Sultana for most of the first verse and chorus, but she returns fire with a blistering guitar solo that would even rock the socks off Eddie Van Halen.

Staying true to her promise to keep playing "until they kick me off or the lights go out", Sultana closes her largest headline show to date with an epic acoustic track reminiscent of John Butler's Ocean. Over what feels like 20 minutes, the surfer-chic singer's fingers cover every millimetre of her guitar's fret board, her foot seemingly stomped through her stompbox, and her voice both gracefully soaring and ferociously growling too many times to count.

Tash Sultana may be a relatively new name to many, but with an incredible live show and a sincere humbleness, everyone's going to be hearing a lot more from this extremely talented artist.