dimanche 13 Avr 2008, 6h54m

Sat 12 Apr – Alela Diane, Mariee Sioux, Lea, DJ St Paul

"The evening of goose bumps." Under that title, two young and promising folk ladies presented themselves in my hometown yesterday. Since there appeared to have been a mix-up somewhere with two different programs, we arrived way to early at De Helling. The concert did not start at 20.15 like it said on the ticket, but almost one hour later, like it said on the website I guess. It didn’t really matter to me, since the dj was trying his best to get us in the right mood for the concerts that were to follow and did so very well. It seemed, however, as if he was afraid to play more than two folksongs in a row, but he did give us loads of good music, including a song by the best folk singer ever: Sandy Denny. I hope someone can add the playlist here, because I did not recognize everything. ;)

However, we were there, of course, to see Mariee Sioux and Alela Diane, two girls from Nevada City, hometown also to one of my favorite singers, Joanna Newsom. Mariee Sioux came up first. She appeared to be rather shy and didn’t say very much, apart from some hardly audible giggled remarks. Her voice was beautiful though, and so is her music. I think the addition of a few musicians would have helped her performance, because now there was a certain kind of sameness to most of her songs, which is less distinct on Faces In The Rocks, her very nice first record. Too bad, not everyone in the audience seemed to appreciate Mariee Sioux as much as I did, because there was a lot of annoying chattering around me.

After an interlude in which the dj kept on playing good music, Alela Diane entered the stage. She was just as young and charming as Mariee Sioux, but an entirely different personality. Her remarkable voice demanded silence from everyone in the audience and she seemed to feel very much at home on the stage, joking about the tuning of the instruments and constantly thanking the audience. She and her band played most songs of The Pirate’s Gospel, but also quite a few new songs (at least, I think they were), an American traditional (The Cuckoo) and even a song by the late and underrated folksinger Kate Wolf.
I don’t really understand why people keep on tagging her music indie-, freak- or even anti-folk, because her music is as traditional as folkmusic can be, which was nicely underlined by the fact that her dad was one of the band members (along with Mariee Sioux and a banjo player with a very cool beard). It all sounded very pure, which made it all the more impressive. After what must have been about 1,5 hour of beautiful music, a wonderful evening came to an end with two separate encores. We didn’t stay around to see the Dutch singer/songwriter Lea, so I can’t tell you if the goose bumps stayed there till the end of the night or if they all went home with me. ;)