Maria Somerville live at the SAT

I hate arriving late to a show, but there is something about it–you get sucked in swiftly, with no preparation or anticipation, into this wall of sound. My chest cracks open, and I am taken.

I mostly know Maria Somerville through her morning show at NTS Radio, “The Early Bird show”, one so dear to so many of us; and Somerville live is just like herself embodying all the music she shares with us, into her own–a coherence so strong and trustworthy there’s is not much to fathom. The mysterious haze around her music is nevertheless so clear and bright, so light and tender yet full of substance. Even if performing almost as a shadow play–no pageantry whatsoever, just silhouettes in between the beam lights–Somerville and her band are not hiding anything, they’re actually showing us everything–everything that lays in the sounds, in the memories, in how our bodies respond. They make it about the music and it’s a true gift.

“Luster” is a holistic charm. It’s an important showcase of a seamless mixture of ambient, folk, shoe gaze, dream pop and post punk–where yearnings for home and broken hearts lead us to a very intimate sentiment of loss, love and life we experience collectively. It blurs softness with asperity, the mundane and the majestic, a reverie so palpable; I had a feeling of being traversed without my presence ever being ignored. Its layered vocal work fusion with the chained effect guitar in such timeless motion, towards a place somewhere that could be ahead or above but it is instead so very grounded and present.

And yet it felt so short. We all agreed.

But perhaps in that way it does the work it should–leaving you with a sense of longing but also an ephemeral nurturing, with nowhere to get too attached to and forget where we come from or why we came here in the first place. It makes you go home in tender steps, awake in feeling.