Jay Som
20th February 2020
Neck Of The Woods, Auckland, New Zealand.
Review by Ali Nicholls. Photography by Richard Myburgh.
LA-based California dreamer Melina Mae Duterte, better known for her solo project Jay Som, shot arrows through the hearts of her first ever Tāmaki audience during her album release show at Neck of the Woods last night.
Beaming forth from the pulled curtains of her intimate bedroom-pop debut, Jay Som’s latest release Anak Ko spreads its gaze wide and ripples over the surface of her shoegaze and dream-pop influences to form a glowing and empowering new album. Riding the waves of tangled emotion toward freedom, strength, and understanding, Anak Ko takes the cradled tenderness of Everybody Works and Turn Into and emboldens it with sounds unbound from genres and powerful lyrics. Her show at Neck of the Woods marking the beginning of her international tour which transformed the personal into the profound throughout a radiant set.
Describing themselves as ‘barbershop grunge’, Tāmaki newcomers Dateline opened the evening, the band beholden to neither genre nor geographic location with members spread out across the north island. Their gazey/folk-punk/bedroom/alt rock sound is tricky to pin down, but sets a romantic tone tinged with irony and skepticism. Their brief set is packed with variety but while no two songs are alike, they have a distinctively nostalgic sound that reinvents itself through their witty lyrics and playful use of tropes from across the board. It’s a teenage dreamer style written for the disillusioned mid-20s realist with a pearly heart at its core. It may be direct and at times comedic, but Dateline have an earnest and hopeful vibe that sets us all up for a glistening night.
The mood tonight for Duterte’s first show in Tāmaki is intimate. Neck of the Woods is about half full when Jay Som takes the stage, allowing breathing room for everyone to stay afloat in their own personal space. It’s a select crowd, and it makes for a personal atmosphere. Duterte and her band come out without bravado, and they seem comfortably nervous about opening the floodgates of Jay Som’s highly acclaimed music.
The set begins with ‘If You Want It’, the track that opens the latest release Anak Ko. Like the rest of the album, it is a song whose tendrils spread across genres but at its center is a pop structure that Jay Som embraced more confidently in her last album than ever before. It gets the crowd moving as we’re smoothly guided through a selection of classics which are simple, catchy, and relatable. ‘Turn Into’ is followed by ‘Baybee’, and then we’re back to the latest release with ‘Nighttime Drive’.
Roughly halfway through and Jay Som shifts us into another depth of sound and mood; Duterte integrating strong atmospheric loops to generate a carefully contained sense of clutter and confusion which she then gently untangles with her thoughtful and introspective lyrics. The pop structures become a playground in which to explore deeper and richer pockets of reflection, and to transcend the emotional limitations of the genres she expertly manipulates.
Despite the new orientation of her sound, Duterte’s demeanor remains casual in her compositions. She seems at her most comfortable when she’s allowing the songs to tell her story. And it’s an important one for us to hear, and one that resonates with a lot of people in the crowd tonight if their adoring support is anything to go by. Jay Som’s dreamy sound builds on the ever-growing legacy of a subgenre of bedroom pop expertly crafted by women, often women of colour and migrants. Her personal musings on love, belonging, hope, and identity have as much meaning to the crowd here tonight as they do to her local fans in the US.
Duterte is at a playful stage of her songwriting and performance now. She’s established a sound and a vibe, and with that, an audience. Now that she’s secure in those, she’s able to dish out tropes from the sister genres to her signature sound and use them to expose some honest and raw emotion in her live performance. By the time we get to the closing numbers of the set, she’s pulling forth a lot more distortion and fuzz, and using it to lift the energy of what would be an otherwise pretty heavy set. Instead we get a sense of the weight of her lyrics and perspective but feel the power of her authenticity carry us through the duration of the night. By the end of the show, I feel as though I’ve had my own subconscious rolled out in front of me, while at the same time been offered a window into a deeply personal and intimate world of understanding that is not my own.
Duterte’s performance was authentic, romantic, confronting, and consoling. She commanded a womb-like environment with her gentle but steadfast stage presence and guided us on an exploration of the world she shares with us with a distinct perspective. A transcendent night, and an intimate insight into strength in vulnerability through her wandering sound.
Were you there at Neck Of The Woods for this magnificent lo-fi dream pop gig? Or have you seen Jay Som perform live somewhere else before? Tell us about it in the comments below!
Setlist:
- If You Want It
- Turn Into
- Baybee
- Nighttime Drive
- Anak Ko
- Peace Out
- Superbike
- Get Well
- Crown
- The Bus Song
- A Thousand Words
- I Think You’re Alright
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