Live Review: Tiny Ruins, Shining Bird

Sunday night in Adelaide in the dead of winter is, unfortunately, a hard sell. So let’s call the audience gathered at Jive tonight for Tiny Ruins’ first Adelaide show in three years ‘intimate’.

Folks are still tumbling in as the show starts. It seems a missed opportunity not to have a local performer on the bill, and as such, things aren’t underway until 9pm. Shining Bird frontman Dane Taylor possesses a baritone Stephin Merritt would be proud of, and it fills the room while his bandmates casually shuffle on stage. Taylor coaxes shapeless ambience from a heavily reverbed guitar, then the three-piece slips suddenly into a sort of new romantic samba that is actually pretty great. Shining Bird are groping for something cinematic; see evidence such as sampled dialogue from Picnic At Hanging Rock, an anecdote about inadvertently pissing David Stratton off at a wedding reception, and – oh yes – all that reverb. For reasons unknown, the band is operating at half capacity tonight, and so we’re left to ponder live the potential of the six-piece version of Shining Bird. As it is, this studio-project-cum-live outfit is ethereal, if not quite as dynamic as you’d like, and, for all the band’s seriousness, tonight’s set is affable in nature. When Tiny Ruins takes the stage shortly afterward, the mood at Jive changes perceptibly to one of quiet expectation.

Bristol-born Hollie Fullbrook has performed as Tiny Ruins since 2009, and is promoting her second record, Brightly Painted One. It’s a delicately textured release, recorded in her adopted hometown of Auckland with newly official Tiny Ruin members Cass Basil and Alexander Freer, among myriad others. Tonight it’s those three core individuals who deliver a raw, naked interpretation of the record. Basil (bass) and Freer (drums) aren’t so much a rhythm section as an ocean tide, rising and falling beneath Fullbrook’s fingerpicking and floaty melodies. Their instruments are carefully tuned and expertly played. Tiny Ruins sound exquisite.

Fullbrook plays mostly newer tracks, but occasionally dips into her distant back catalogue, and takes some crowd requests for her solo encore. We’re also treated to what is likely the prettiest version of Bob Dylan’s I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine ever performed. There is a reason Tiny Ruins is touring the world in support of respected names like Neil Finn, Joanna Newsom, Fleet Foxes and Calexico. As it turns out, the small crowd at Jive tonight was thoroughly privileged to have witnessed a world class act in such a candid, personal setting.