Year two of Melbourne’s Rising festival ushers in a comfortably cool winter with dozens of reasons to leave the house after sunset. With significant Victorian government funding and promotion – even a giant logo projected onto Flinders St. Station – Rising’s mix of music, theatre, dance and art installations sprawls across the city for two weeks this June.
With an extensive, diverse roster of international and local artists, the festival bills itself as “a microcosm of Australia’s creative capital here and now”. Though its timing does make for a convenient extra stop for touring artists after Vivid in Sydney, there is a certain je ne sais quoi that elevates Rising above similar concepts. Maybe it’s the abundance of ways in which it makes the city come to life, with so many shared moments within and around Melbourne’s familiar monuments. Or maybe it’s in the exclusivity – no one can see it all and supposedly every major gig has a giant waitlist.
NME spends Rising this year seeing four of its buzziest international headliners, spending four nights in a row at the Forum Theatre from June 7 to 10. On a rainy Wednesday night, local openers Lost Animal deliver deranged ramblings over two-chord, lounge-music cassette loops. Singer Jarrod Quarrell’s jerky self-loathing stage persona is wildly compelling in moments – but doesn’t let through enough vulnerability to make the emotional connection that he could.
But that puzzling contrast is quickly dispelled as Weyes Blood fills the 1,500-capacity downstairs theatre with a warm, almost maternal presence. Fronting a four-piece band, singer-songwriter Natalie Mering is a vision of high-femme glamour in a draping white gown.
Live music is often transporting, but rarely so much as Weyes Blood, whose gentle folk-rock makes you believe you could be at Woodstock hearing Joni Mitchell in full flight. But Mering’s a thoroughly modern artist too, with lyrics about collective anxiety, visuals by documentarian Adam Curtis, and surprisingly deadpan jokes in between. While her poppier songs delight, her two slow-burning, heavenly ballads – ‘Movies’ and ‘God Turn Me into a Flower’ – are absolute showstoppers that bring the house down.
In the smaller, seated theatre upstairs, Ichiko Aoba can make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up with the sound of her breath alone. She could be described as chamber-folk, but that alone vastly understates the beauty of her music. Whether or not you speak Japanese, her songs conjure up images of forests, flowing water, childhood (when she covers the theme from Studio Ghibli’s Ponyo), even romance. Few performers are so one with their instrument – hers, primarily a fingerpicked nylon-string guitar. Aoba performs so softly that you notice every detail, the whole room becoming one resonant chamber.
The next night, Ethel Cain makes the same room feel far too small for her burgeoning star power. The dark Americana singer-songwriter enters the stage dressed in a sweater and jeans that make her eerily reminiscent of a young Kurt Cobain – which feels fitting given the hero’s welcome she’s received on her first Australian tour. She opens the show with a simple, reassuring smile – that after collapsing from exhaustion at her first Sydney gig, she’s OK.
Over an hour, she takes us to church. ‘A House in Nebraska’ feels like a 21st-century call for salvation, while her droney slowcore songs feel even more macabre with the low end of live drums and guitar. Her voice is deceptively powerful, but most special is the way she holds intense eye contact with the devoted fans in the front rows as they serenade each other. It’s a truly rare artist who can hold space for such a powerful collective release of tears and joy, especially for the many queer and trans audience members. Ethel Cain will be playing far bigger venues next time around.
On the final night of NME’s run, local hip-hop duo Fly Boy Jack are thrilled to be opening the downstairs theatre. MC Jordan Dennis and DJ/producer JUJO are each a jack of all trades – masters of old-school samples, trap beats and dense, Twista-like flows. They’re pure charisma, and deserve to have this big an audience every night.
If you’ve heard a Thundercat album, with its smooth, precise neo-soul grooves, you’ve only experienced 10 per cent of his live show. In person, the other 90 per cent is ferocious, Weather Report-on-fast-forward jazz fusion shredding. With Thundercat himself on six-string bass, accompanied by a drummer and keyboardist, their songs start in a recognisable place, then go wildly off the rails for close to 10 minutes at a time, before miraculously finding their way back to something resembling their records.
It’s so dazzling and exhausting that the crowd, though delighted, can barely muster the energy to clap for as long as each song deserves. But the soul is there, on his biggest hits ‘Them Changes’ and ‘Dragonball Durag’ – as are the jokes, when Thundercat waxes about his Diablo IV addiction, and joining the mile-high club in Australia.
It’s hard to imagine a more perfect run of gigs – for half a week, it feels as if nothing else exists outside the Forum Theatre. If there is a throughline at all, it’s that these are no ordinary shows; all four headliners are completely devoted to the embodiment of their art.
And yet – everyone who attends Rising will get a different experience. If the other performances are even half as good, the festival is sure to be a staple of Melbourne winters for years to come.
Rising Melbourne runs till June 18 – find more info here