Gig Review: Clementine Valentine @ Whammy Bar, Auckland – 16/09/2023

Clementine Valentine took to the Whammy stage in Auckland on the fourth and final date of their nationwide album release tour. Their new album entitled The Coin That Broke The Fountain Floor, was released through Flying Nun Records in August 2023. Rolling Stone have called it “a thing of quiet majesty”. Whilst RNZ described the art-pop duo as having “a palette that’s hard to pin down”.

In support, was interdisciplinary artist i.e. crazy (Frances Lebeau), a tour-de-force presenting the political fiercely and with an ability to capture the zeitgeist. It made me both want to laugh and cry at the same time. I was totally caught off guard with “Have you seen (REDACTED)?. Have you seen Jane?” A lyric that stays with you. See them live if you can.

From a family of musicians Clementine and Valentine Nixon’s press highlighted a slew of high-profile performances; a familial lineage in musicianship in a traditional type of travelling musician. There is a place for myth making for musicians in this case, I am led to think of medieval traditions, not lost, just rarely highlighted.

All of this deepened the mystery of what to expect from Clementine Valentine live. Whammy was packed to the brim and a quiet crowd listened and praised attentively as the music seemed to pour from every molecule of air. When I think about the set as a whole, I want to say it felt new and it did, but it also felt like powerful singers who I knew well. I wouldn’t group them together but personally, or maybe anecdotally, they ticked the same boxes for me as Maria Callas or Eliza Carthy.

It was their feminine voices that provoked. It was ethereal and fearless. Understudy felt like a trickle of warm water, its music full of emotional impact. It wasn’t lacking in performance either. Valentine reached her outstretched arm into the crowd as she sang, inches from the edge of the stage, she drew us into the spell of the dream-like, percussion-fringed, layered harmonies of their vision in sound.

All Yesterdays Flowers, the final track on their album, seemed to embody the sound of the evening, on the edge of discernible lyrically, spacious, a rising bloom of a song.

Photo Credit: Katie-Lee Webster
i.e. Crazy Photo Gallery
Clementine Valentine Photo Gallery