- Carla Geneve’s observations are wryly humorous, which is a fine way to cope with pain and heartbreak. She brings a shrewd, flinty style of rocking, folksy blues and country that has more than a bit of the off-kilter grin of Courtney Barnett . Geneve’s pain is much closer to the surface however and sometimes sardonic gestures aren’t enough to cover the cracks. That’s when her music comes surging up: immediate, emotional and powerfully demanding.
Geneve has a big, clean voice and it goes pound-for-pound up against the wailing blues of her guitar on her new, self-titled EP. Actually, sometimes, it edges out the guitar by a nose and you’ll never hear that more acutely than when she rages through the emotion of opener, Empty Stomach. That voice splinters into a million shards as she screams “Oh, it’s obscene!” It pushes beyond what her throat can take and I hope she can take the pain, because it’s an arresting performance. That’s an anthem to bad love along fairly classic lines, but you’ll hear more of the slice-of-life stuff on the ensuing Things Change which, thankfully, lowers the pressure. It’s a humorous dig at a friend, or an ex-lover and how life pulls things out of recognisable shape. “Did you feel under pressure to be yourself? / Did you think it was time to start looking after your health?” Or, more tellingly, “Did you fall in love? / Or have you given up on that?” It has that easy-going, Paul Kelly quality and is underwritten by subtle tension that becomes more plaintive as the song progresses, ending jaggedly on the line “Coz, I can’t keep up.”
After those fairly broken excursions into the lives of others, 2001 retreats into the personal realm and ruefully celebrates Geneve’s love of classic sci-fi as an absurd symbol of her dysfunction and isolation. “I wake up / I'm scattered and still drunk / I read Jack Vance / Don't see myself getting up.” Oh well, I like Jack Vance too. The song ends on a furious and unsettling burst of guitar.
Yesterday’s Clothes plunges back into relationship disharmony. Relentlessly interrogating a sleeping partner, “Would you sleep better without me?” It’s sharply self-accusatory and sad, but gives you a much-needed, mostly instrumental burst of catharsis in the bridges and outro, where it also, finally bellows “I could be strong” but doesn’t really believe it.
Juliet is a bluesy epic that aims to rival the emotional intensity of the EP’s opening. It’s a primal scream of abandonment: “You left my soul!” The most theatrical number here, it moves away from the more intimate realities of Geneve’s experience and taps into a giant, roaring, rocking, blues tradition.
Having burnt all that fuel, right down to ash, the acoustic outro slumps back into the Kelly-esque Australiana of I Hate You (For Making Me Not Want To Leave The City). It’s a wistful road trip, but largely untroubled by the emotional jags that led here. While much of it is nostalgic, it might even be hopeful about love and the future “It’s dusk and the air is kinda smokey / I think to myself that it’s the most beautiful place that I’ve ever been / Maybe because it means that I’m closer to home / Maybe because I know that the next time I see it, there’s a possibility that you might be sitting here next time.” By this point it shouldn’t really be surprising that Geneve can’t let that pass. She finishes with a sour wink worthy of Laura Imbruglia ”I pull over and think about how much I hate you for making me not want to leave the city.”
As much as it’s a heaving, emotional monstrosity, Carla Geneve’s debut is also a fine piece of music. It has a laconic but easygoing style that’s easily worthy of those Barnett and Kelly comparisons. It takes that and supercharges it with the raw power of voice, guitar and ragged emotion. Can you keep up this kind of intensity for long? That remains to be seen. As of the minute, I’m wholly fixated by the four-alarm fire that is Carla Geneve.
- Chris Cobcroft.