Reviews

Irish Times writers review Jem at Dublin's Ambassador theatre, CocoRosie at Whelan's and  La Bohème at the National Concert Hall.

Jem

Ambassador, Dublin

Davin O'Dwyer

From her short name to her inoffensively bland music, 28- year-old Welsh singer Jem is patently suffering from a Dido complex. Her songs are immediately accessible, with an over-produced sheen that even a live performance can't shake.

Skinny enough to feature in one of those magazines wailing about how skinny celebrities are becoming, Jem is showing a lot of toned belly for a chilly December night. But like her music, her flesh-baring is of the innocuous, girl-next-door variety. Her affable between- song banter merely reinforces the image.

When she introduces Just a Ride by explaining it's dedicated to the late and very caustic US comedian Bill Hicks, an appreciative whoop goes up from the modest-sized crowd. It's hard to tell if this is because Jem's audience are all unlikely Bill Hicks fans or if they maybe just like to whoop, but with lyrics such as "Life, it's ever so strange, it's so full of change", it's safe to say Hicks would have had something scathing to say about the song.

Jem's lyrical insight seems restricted to observations such as "Today is the first day of the rest of your life", which hardly counts for profundity.

All of the songs from her album Finally Woken get an airing, and most are just as saccharine in performance as they are on record, particularly the cloying Wish I. An acoustic Flying High improves on the album and hints at Jem's ability, as does a bouncy and exuberant 24.

Filling out her set with some covers brings mixed results. Coldplay's In My Place is given extra helpings of blandness, while an animated Sweet Home Alabama gets maybe the best reception of the night; ironic given that Jem just introduced it, vocal duties going to her talented keyboard player.

She ends with probably her biggest hit so far, They. "I'm sorry, so sorry, it's like this", she sings, and it sounds like she's apologising for the brief set (just over an hour). They, like many of Jem's songs, straddles a very fine line: intelligent pop music on the one side, bland and over-produced commercialism on the other.

It's difficult to actively dislike Jem, but until she gets away from the Dido template, it's difficult to be enthusiastic about her either.

CocoRosie

Whelan's, Dublin

Peter Crawley

Let's hope Sierra and Bianca Casady never act their age, otherwise the Brooklyn-based sisters in their early twenties might lose a unique place among the idiosyncratic legions of the American nu-folk scene. Drawing from a oddly harmonious blend of styles - the blues, opera, hip-hop - and incorporating an eclectic clutter of instruments - piano, harp, dictaphones, decommissioned Fisher-Price toys - their music carries the glitter of girlishness with a sombre echo of the ancient. These songs of innocence and experience coursed through CocoRosie's luminous appearance in Whelan's.

Taking to the stage beneath grainy video projections of Care Bears and waifish gymnasts, the pair are a model of incongruous, boho chic. Wearing a feather in her baseball cap, the operatically trained multi-instrumentalist Sierra begins a haunting, skeletal melody at the piano.

Bianca, lost in the folds of an outsized Tupac Shakur T-shirt, accompanies her in an ageless whisper; two parts Billie Holiday to one part Shirley Temple.

From the creaking introduction of The Sea is Calm to the music-box melody of K-Hole (with energetic, plosive beat-box provided by an unnamed accomplice), the Casadys use the scowl of their hip-hop to loosely mask the frown of their blues.

Their voices may circle around tales of orphans finding love in Prison cells (Beautiful Boyz), or the white slave trade (Lyla), or abused housewives (By Your Side), but the dreamy lull of Sierra's folk arpeggios ensure that not all in CocoRosie's world is woebegone.

In fact, there is more than a touch of dress-up fantasy in these plaints, offset by the beautifully lovelorn Good Friday, the throwaway groove of new song Japan, and Bianca's sultry and super-unlikely cover of Kevin Lyttle's lubricious grind, Turn Me On.

Nothing, though, is quite as spectacularly bizarre as Sierra's sudden, vigorous body-poppin' moves during a thumping Noah's Ark. At times like this, CocoRosie hum with wide-eyed fantasy, hip knowingness and that defiantly mature resolve to never put away childish things.

La Bohème

National Concert Hall

John Allen

Puccini's setting of Murger's tales of 19th-century Bohemian life in Paris concentrates on the romantic affairs of two sets of lovers. The opera is imbued with youthful passions and peopled by young characters who express those passions unashamedly.

RTÉ's line-up of relative newcomers in Friday's concert version was a particularly convincing one, especially in musical matters. Indeed, this mostly Irish cast offered one of the best sung La Bohèmes I have heard in a long time.

Mairéad Buicke, making her debut in the title role, occasionally fluttered under pressure, but overall she gave a performance of some distinction. Her smooth soprano soared in all the right places and she spanned Puccini's wide phrases with ease.

As her poet lover, British tenor Peter Auty matched her in lyrical gracefulness and threw out some thrilling high phrases of his own. Their voices blended in their numerous duets and their vocal acting in the last act was heart-breakingly convincing.

Alison Roddy and Owen Gilhooly were equally good as the second pair of lovers. Roddy, the most experienced of the main principals, sang a full- toned and intelligently phrased account of the famous waltz song, blended nicely into the Act 3 quartet and was poignantly dignified in the moving final scene.

Gilhooly's Marcello was well sung and acted. His warm baritone was the strongest of the male voices. Bass-baritone John Molloy produced suitably deep tones as the philosopher Colline and baritone Damian Smith was a vocally lightweight but impressively mature Schaunard.

There were good cameos from Philip O'Reilly and Frank O'Brien, the latter scoring more highly by sticking to the composer's actual notes.

Gerhard Markson directed his forces tellingly, especially in the more overtly romantic portions of the score, where his expansive phrasing inspired the singers and elicited some beautiful sounds from the strings of RTÉ NSO.