And she broke everyones heart a little....

So the Lyndallator(ha) and I went to a nice little gig on friday at Cafe Oto to go and see this young American Indian lass called Mariee Sioux.
For starters Cafe Oto is cool.
Its a small place with tables set up where you can get Japanese food, good coffee and booze. (although we had a boozeless gig as we were riding our bikes)
So it began with Alessi's Ark first, although without the Ark part, which I gather is her band and not a boat full of animals, so just Alessi then.
She was great. Really quite quirky, and the songs were all very short and very pretty. Quick fire bursts of pleasure with nice hooks that kinda made you want them to keep going. She also had a nice way of keeping the gig really light, with a few comical stuff ups where she would just stop playing all together, apologise, then have to remember where she was up to and keep going. It was also very hot in there and seeing this very softly spoken, hippie dress wearing girl wipe her forehead on her dress like a farmer on a hot day....if farmers wore dresses, well ,it looked pretty comical.
Next up was Rick Tomlinson. I liked him the most. He played two tracks, each one about 20-25mins long.
It was just him sitting in the middle of the stage, head bowed, with a guitar. He had the guitar plugged into a multi track sampler. So he began playing what is best described as spanish-old-west-folk-mexican style guitar, sampling a bit, playing some more, sampling some more etc etc etc etc.
He added beat samples in by banging the side of his guitar, and by the end of each track, you ended up with something that sounded more like Aphex Twin than folk music. Anyway I really enjoyed it, but felt like it was a funny choice of middle act for what was essentially a folk gig. I like music that changes slowly over time like that though(of course). When you get to the end you have no idea how you arrived at this sonic place from something so quiet and your brain tries to string together the middle part, usually unsuccessfully.
So then Mariee came on. I must admit I was pretty sure I wouldn't like her as all the stuff I have listened to is pretty cheesey, but she treaded the line damn well and stayed on the good side of it. I noticed that lots of her songs mention snakes though. I think perhaps all of them.
Anyway, she is a softly spoken and pretty girl, and you get the feeling everybody would probably like her even if she didn't play songs and just came up on stage and had a chat. But she did play songs. And they were nice. And I was in the mood for nice. It turned out her friend had just died and she used to play the last song she played with her all the time. She looked like she was going to cry when she sung it. It was heartbreaking.