After a three-year musical hiatus during which an exhausted Stella Donnelly was dropped by Secretly Canadian – the U.S label which first brought her lyrically caustic indie folk to prominence – the Welsh Australian singer-songwriter returned last November with the release of third album Love and Fortune. That someone with Donnelly’s gifts as artist and performer should succumb to a burn out that saw her return to Melbourne and work jobs at a cemetery and a bakery probably says a lot about how difficult it is for musical talent to flourish in the current climate.
Thus, it’s great to see Donnelly back on stage and her sprightly “Hello” and glowing smile at the start of proceedings is characteristic of her effortless charm, though in alluding to her nervousness she keeps it short and informs us that “we’ll talk later.”
Her latest album, inspired by a significant friendship breakup, is a stripped down and almost hymnal mediation as to what went wrong. Within opener ‘Standing Ovation,’ Donnelly appears to take some of the blame as she sings “Sorry for the mess I made/And thanks for everything” over sparse, droning synth, before later breaking forth into a twanging guitar shuffle. Donnelly’s keyboard chord progression on ‘Flood’, the titular track from her 2022 sophomore record, burrows instantly into the ears and are a preface to a memorably hooky chorus.
Clocking in at just over half an hour, a characteristic of the recent album is multiple sub-two-minute tunes that arrive and disappear again almost as sonic cameos. ‘Friend’, described by Donnelly as “our baby song”, is another barebones keyboard arrangement atop which her plaintively soft vocals ponder the impact of lost friendship. Introduced as “about bleeding profusely”, ‘Being Nice’ is another fleeting tune, but this time its message is delivered amidst a spry pattern of backing vocals and swiftly changing guitar chords.
The fact of Donnelly being so comfortably wry and explicit with the travails of the menstrual cycle is no surprise, of course. Hers is a candid approach that features again in ‘Mosquito’, sardonic fingerpicked folk that contains the rather forthright lyric “I use my vibrator/wishing it was you.”
Elsewhere, the newer songs fit soundly within Donnelly’s set, one that leans heavily on her 2019 breakout album Beware of the Dogs. ‘Laying Low’ has a hazy tinge of electronica, and a dream-pop chorus; sung atop just the faintest pulse of synthesiser, ‘Baths’ is essentially a near acapella hymn, and ‘Feel It Change’ is the more clean, guitar-driven indie rock of Donnelly’s earlier material, with lead guitarist Ellie Mason’s gliding riffs combining well with some swooning vocal harmonies.
True to form, though it’s perhaps slightly reined-in due to the set’s tight sixty-minute duration, Donnelly’s between song badinage sparkles with an impish charm. Before ‘Lunch,’ she confesses that she has forgotten to simultaneously tune her guitar while addressing the audience, and then is sure to apply herself to the task in order to save us “three minutes of hell.” Before a debut outing of ‘Please Everyone’, she informs us of a fan emailing with a pre-show song request, and when said fan shouts “I love you!” from the back of the crowd, Donnelly jokingly enquiries “How do you know I’m talking about yours? Someone requested Wonderwall.”
Ahead of a two-song solo spot, she equates the newer songs to a “G-String you’re still trying to get used to” and the more established ones as slipping into a comfortable pair of undergarments. ‘Mechanical Bull’, being from Donnelly’s 2017 debut EP Thrush Metal, is thus perhaps akin to her oldest and most cozy pair of keks. The sweetly scornful fingerpicked folk of ‘U Owe Me’ – an acerbic stab at a former boss – sees Donnelly replace the lyric referencing “shit” Aussie beer VB with the more locally recognised Wiper & True, though sung with a laugh in its obvious incongruity with the song’s rhyming scheme.
The show ends with a hattrick of Donnelly’s most established tunes from Beware of the Dogs. She dedicates ‘Beware of the Dogs’ – typical of that album’s patriarchy-skewering themes – to “a free Palestine” and declares her privilege in existing as a result of “a colonial system built on genocide.” She semi-apologises for playing all her “grumpy songs in a row” in introducing ‘Old Man’, a catchy lament of lascivious male-entitlement. Before final track “Tricks”, Donnelly offers the audience a heartfelt “We’ve come from a long way away so it’s so lovely to be treated so nicely.” And it’s good to have her back; Donnelly has personal and musical gifts too bright for life in a Melbourne bakery.
Scott Hammond
