Live Review: Joelistic, Dialectrix, N'fa Jones - The Workers Club

For a night of reputable Aussie hip hop, it's fitting that N'fa Jones starts the party. He saunters onto the stage, all confidence and bravado. After apologising for the minimal stage design in this intimate space, he bursts into new single Flying with its wailing chorus. Ever cool and appreciative, the former 1200 Techniques frontman encourages the slowly filling, curious crowd to sing along with hits 4 Queue Interlude and Cause An Effect, occasionally slipping into impressive freestyles.

With the crowd now properly warmed up, Dialectrix (aka Ryan Leaf) is ready to come out and deliver on his reputation for complex, intelligent rhymes. He's not as comfortable interacting with the crowd between songs, but quickly gets us jumping. Burning through the '90s-inspired Pieces Of The Puzzle, the Sydney rapper shouts out that he's “from the old school” as the audience starts to sweat in this stuffy space. Bouncing off Jones, who's spinning the tracks from the back of the stage, Leaf settles into his set after calling out for an audience member to buy him a whisky, holding the mic tight to his face and spitting out a high density of syllables in the Whut! verses. The chilled-out Take Flight sees punters screaming, “See you when I get back!” in the chorus. After playing Encore, his last track for the night, Leaf instructs that we “get drunk in peace” and then departs. 

The crowd, now drenched in sweat, is ready for Joelistics (aka Joel Ma). There's lots of Joelistics fans in the house and these storm the stage and sing along with every word of opener The People – a slow burning head banger. Wearing a baggy black coat and with his long sleek hair, the Chinese-Australian rapper climbs a speaker with a cheeky grin on his face and the audience is all over him. Everyone listens intently to the political Say I'm Good, a song about how fucked Australia is, and you can see why Ma calls his genre modern folk music. After officially launching the single In The Morning, and putting on an entertaining freestyle with Jones, his anthem Days closes the night. If these three hip hop stars are anything to go by, the future of Australian hip hop looks bright.