Live Review: Iron & Wine, Fraser A Gorman

Melbourne troubadour Fraser A Gorman walks out into the cavernous expanse of QPAC's Concert Hall armed with just an acoustic guitar and a harmonica around his neck, looking for all the world like a young Bob Dylan (a fact he acknowledges with a laugh after his first song). He offers strong new tracks - with a whistling interlude in one that Gorman promises us constitutes "jazz" - after which he offers up his lazily anthemic new single Walking To Oman's. He makes Golden Smog's Radio King his own then closes with the soaring Broken Hands and the classic-sounding My Old Man (both from his 2015 debut Slow Gum). It's no mean feat holding court in such a huge room on your lonesome and the talented Gorman achieves this feat with aplomb.

Ten puffy white clouds hang above the stage adding a quaint ambience and soon four figures emerge from the darkness, stage left, and take their places before starting on the spooky soundtrack underpinning Winter Prayers. Before long the elegantly dishevelled silhouette of Sam Beam enters from the other side of the stage clutching a glass of wine and gesturing like a pantomime villain for the crowd to keep quiet - Iron & Wine are in the house.

Beam's immense beard - as always - dominates proceedings visually, but as they move through the epic and undulating The Trapeze Swinger it's clear that his band - who are with him in Australia for the first time - elevate things to a whole new level, especially the beautiful harmonies of keyboardist Eliza Hardy-Jones and drummer Beth Goodfellow (whose subtle percussion throughout also adds immense heft). Tunes from recent album Beast Epic such as Last Night, Claim Your Ghost and Summer Clouds - which seems to have inspired the stage set - translate wonderfully to the live realm. The band perform bathed in shadows - illuminated only by washes of light on the wall behind them - and this adds visual beauty to the delicate and poignant music. Beam holds court between songs with gentle humour, the pastoral simplicity of old tune Sodom, South Georgia segueing seamlessly into the ominous overtones of Boy With A Coin. The bulk of the band (save bassist Sebastian Steinberg) leave the fray as we're treated to the stripped-back elegance of Tree By The River and soon we're left with just Beam with an acoustic guitar taking requests from his besotted followers: after some humourous crowd interplay Big Burned Hand and the beautiful Naked As We Came are afforded solo renditions, Beam's voice as smooth as honey as it wafts through the hall.

The full band return as Beam channels Lou Reed throughout Grace For Saints And Ramblers, while super-early rarity Someday The Waves is as light as the caress of a velvety breeze. More older tunes follow in the form of the sparse Love And Some Verses and the softly jaunty Pagan Angel And A Borrowed Car, before the immersive and slow-burn Call It Dreaming moves into old chestnut Muddy Hymnal and they bring it all home with the yearningly plaintive Song In Stone.

The immense midweek crowd, however, is far from satiated by this gorgeously delicate performance, coaxing the five musicians back - Jones and Goodfellow now donning fake beards to match their hirsute bandleader - and we're left with the southern gothic majesty of About A Bruise to complete a quietly triumphant evening, the band having fun until the very end holding the song's final note an interminably long time before leaving the fray to a standing ovation.