On the 2nd of April, Honi Soit reporters Calum and Will attended Mallrat’s concert at the Enmore Theatre. Below is a snippet of their midnight post-show conversation on the walk back to Calum’s house.
Will: Alright, I’ll set the scene. Calum and I are walking back to his house from the Enmore Theatre. I was meant to go home tonight, but Mallrat came out at 10:45pm and I would not have made my last train. I’m a little annoyed but whatever. We’re a few wines deep…
Calum: It’s also midnight.
W: No no no, it’s two minutes to midnight.
C: Two minutes, the doomsday clock has been set. Can I ask an opening question about the concert to you, Will?
W: Yes.
C: I want to make sure we’re on the same page. What would you rate that concert?
W: I’d give it a solid seven.
C: Okay same, cause I walked in thinking I’d have it higher and you’d have it lower, like an eight and a six.
W: Interesting.
C: Maybe a seven and a half.
W: I support that. We’re gonna talk a lot about Mallrat’s artistry and musical talent, but I just have to say, my God she was hot.
C: She was, she was stunning. When she walked on stage she was so hot, and the only thing that counted against her was the furry tail.
W: I appreciated the fox fur, it was so 2000s Gossip Girl.
C: I describe it as a ‘school girl/cowgirl fit’.
W: I see that. I will say, an immediate problem from the start was tech issues. There were mic issues, and also, this was clearly a choice cause I haven’t seen this at other shows at the Enmore, but there was no front-facing lighting, and I couldn’t physically see her face.
C: There was a really interesting effect created by not using that lighting. It backlit her in this gorgeous aesthetic halo that really put her in an ethereal space which fit the tone of her music. The consequence of that was that it was really hard to know when she was singing, and when I was interacting with a person.
W: It was very bass heavy, and there were a lot of times where you couldn’t distinctly hear when Mallrat was singing or when it was the backing track. I fully believe she was singing live, and that she has a beautiful voice, but considering her voice was blending in with the backing track, and that she also had mic issues, it was a problem.
A train passes very loudly above us. We lose some of the audio here.
C: … it was very reverb heavy and vocally distorted, and you couldn’t tell her singing apart from the laying of the background track. When you’ve got an audience who know her through her earlier stuff like Groceries and Charlie, which are very stripped back compared to her new stuff, it feels very off to lose that clarity of her voice.
W: Charlie was beautiful, I mean, you cried.
C: I did.
W: But as the second-last encore song I was like “huh, this feels a little empty, it doesn’t have the ‘oomph’ her other songs did in their production.” There’s a reason it’s the encore song, and that it’s endured for so long.
C: Charlie has been covered by so many other bands, and it’s a really powerful song, but it felt so divorced from the rest of the set which was so dance heavy.
W: It was exciting, I’ll say, when she introduced it by saying “this is the beginning of the world tour”. You could tell she was so confident and proud, and had so much joy on that stage, and she was truly enamoured by the love she was getting from the audience which was very deserved. Something I did notice was that people weren’t really dancing, they were sort of just nodding their heads, which was frustrating for a dance album. There was one specific song, R U High, where I was just thinking “why is no one dancing?”
C: Both of us were going really hard for that one, and we were jumping and could see no one else for miles dancing. But if nothing else, this was a good concert to go to with you, cause we feed off each other’s energy a bit.
W: Exactly!
C: Going back to the idea of the world tour, she balanced, in a really interesting way, the line between dance and intimacy. It felt like a very intimate crowd, and they employed the house lights in a really interesting manner to almost pulse, so it felt like during her songs, you were sort of caught in the swell of it all.
W: It is a little wild, though, that I saw more of the faces around me than her face.
C: Yeah. She would pause and sit down and stoop, so we got these almost statuesque moments of her framed in a very intimate posture, crouched down and curled over the microphone singing. It felt like we were having these dance tracks that she was performing as confessional, which created this really interesting juxtaposition in the imagery. So not seeing the face really helped the visual concepts she was going for.
W: Yeah and I think you were so enchanted by some of this imagery that you had no choice but to grab onto my tit, an emotional support breast if you will, multiple times throughout the night. I really respected that, as a testament to the concert experience.
C: You’re not gonna mention the bit when you grabbed my hand and put it back on there until I honked?
W: We’re not gonna shame people for the things they do for emotional support, Calum.
C: I did need emotional support for this concert.
W: Okay, what’s your highlight of the show?
C: One note before we do this: the setlist worked really well throughout. However, the mix of going from Groceries to a very bass-heavy song, I found very jarring. She’d do a few heavy dance songs, then a slow one, and the breaks worked to an extent, but it broke the flow for me. It didn’t feel like a coherent journey.
W: I quite liked the setlist structure, I think it did justice to the emotional parts of her discography. Groceries being in the middle of the setlist really spoke to… like she introduced it by saying “Groceries” and everyone just knew what was coming, the setlist broke the songs up really well.
C: I guess I wanted another song to break up what Groceries does to me before we started dancing again.
W: That’s fair.
C: Okay, my highlight… actually you do your highlight first.
W: My highlight was Rockstar. I’ve loved that song for years, I saw Mallrat open for Kylie Minogue this year and she did not play that song. It’s this beautiful, dreamy song of sad anger. It’s such a specific emotion of ‘I’m so bitter because I’m actually quite devastated’ which I don’t see a lot in music, and I was very excited to see that live. And you?
C: This is an atypical highlight, but… why are you texting?
W: I’m telling my parents we’re home and safe.
Calum and Will walk into Calum’s house and finish this chat at the dining table.
C: It was interesting to see songs like Teeth and Groceries and Charlie live. Getting this great deal of catharsis by seeing Charlie live, and sitting with all of these emotions I’ve been dealing with in a very personal sense over the last week, and encountering this conversation around fraught love was very powerful for me. Following up this moment where I’ve been sitting and crying and sobbing in this song with the really big dance closer which allowed me to shake it out gave me this incredible freedom from those feelings. It was very powerful for me.
W: It was a really nice pivot to go from giving you a really big deep hug to dancing everything out. Do you want to give the Honi audience a run through of what’s been happening in your life in the lead up to the Mallrat concert?
C: I don’t know how simply I can do it. How can I do it in one sentence? Ummm…
Audio cuts out here.
