Live Review: Mitski, Moaning Lisa

Oxford Art Factory was already filling up by the time Canberra’s Moaning Lisa emerged on stage and totally blew us away. The band of three women and one bloke - Charlotte Versegi and Hayley Manwaring sharing bass, guitar and vocal duties; Yee Ning Chan on guitar; and Hayden Fritzlaff on drums - play blistering Sonic Youth-styled garage, soft builds collapsing into wailing breakdowns. Versegi and Manwaring’s duelling vocals, akin to Sleater-Kinney, cry out relatable lyrics, a favourite being last year’s ode to Carrie Brownstein (and Kim Deal, and Annie Clark, and Florence Welch), Carrie (I Want A Girl). 

Moaning Lisa were a formidable presence on stage, Versegi falling to the ground after particularly intense outros, and she’s already nailed stage banter. She explained that she’s on her period, because the universe and her hormones agreed she ought to be as emotional as possible for Mitski’s headline set: “Thank you for all being here on my cycle.” Remember Moaning Lisa, they’ll be thrashing their way through squealing festival headline sets before you know it.

Mitski and her band padded out onto the unlit OAF stage for their sold-out Laneway Festival sideshow, the crowd already crying out for the singer-songwriter who so succinctly encapsulates a deeply feminine version of desire. Mitski shows us the power of the woman desiring, obsessing, acting, being hypervulnerable - there’s strength in that, in putting your feelings on the table.

Mitski seems to pair her lyrical content - often a woman outpouring feelings of love, loneliness and lust, evoking the sound of trains rumbling, the smell of coffee, the image of shoes banging up the insides of a washing machine - with meticulously staged, almost-theatrical live shows. Every movement seemed premeditated, carefully choreographed, actions controlled, adding to the image of Mitski as an enigma, a force. At first her arms gesture at tight right angles, or she paces back and forth across the stage, faster and faster, a manifestation of anxiety, before she seems to loosen and fold back over a stool, her body contorting like a ballerina or swirling around in a moment of pure jubilation. 

Dressed in A Burning Hill’s white button-down, Mitski opened with Remember My Name, arms held rigidly behind her back, before performing songs from across her five-record career - impressive, considering she’s only 28. The audience howled along loudly with Mitski’s sometimes-delicate vocals - to the extent that sometimes she didn’t have to sing at all - on songs mostly pulled from last year’s Be The Cowboy, 2016’s Puberty 2, and Bury Me At Makeout Creek, like Geyser, First Love / Late Spring, Nobody, Happy and Your Best American Girl. Sometimes the crowd would wail in appreciation at the first throbbing note of a bass guitar, a drum beat, a strum of the guitar. It felt like the room wanted to express to Mitski - one shouting, “I love you!” - that we’re passionate and unapologetic about it too. 

Mitski closed the main set alone with her guitar with A Burning Hill, standing still beneath a spotlight connecting with her fans and seeming to advise them, after burning like a “forest fire”, to go out into the night and “love the littler things”. The devoted were then rewarded with a full-band rendition of “deep cut” Goodbye, My Danish Sweetheart as an encore.