Keeley Forsyth / Maja Lena (live at Strange Brew)

Bristol
10 March 2022

The acoustic charms of Stroud-based Maja Lena are first up, a songbird sweetness of voice attached to a fingerpicking deftness, that ’60s Yamaha neck dwarfing her fingers, her vocals skipping like wind-blown grass to gentle tonal shifts, then leaping unexpectedly in joyous abandon.

The slumbering reflections of her Christmas-themed song reverbing to those silent quilted fields, the matted mulch of morning leaves. A fireside warmth that oozes on over you as her agile voice hoops back into a hazy summer’s afternoon, fingers caught in its glitterball light. The tonal zig zags of “Plutonic” full of Cocteau-esque pirouettes and rouletting riches. The lattice-like wonder of her final track “Antara” that sends my knuckles rhythmically skipping along the table.

A radiant joy the submerged echoey debris of Keeley Forsyth’s band threw into sharp contrast. This dark and contorted disquieting tension has Keeley crawling onto the stage on her hands and knees, slowly pulling herself up, hunched up over a swinging mic; you can hear tiny gasps of breath, the odd scar of feedback. The atmosphere is incredible, wrapped in foetal beats, her black-suited frame stumbling around like Dr Caligari’s somnambulist, a sliver of face in all that long black hair.

She begins to sing, and it’s like flickering light that sonically spectres, marinates the imagination as it creeps under your skin in a shivering rush, her taut, sombre narrative clinging to the smokey greyness of the stage. Visions that sweep over you, open up the vastness of a windswept prairie then cast it back into an insular, needled focus. Her repeated lines manically circling something unresolved as her body exacts a convulsive union to every single word.

An absolutely captivating performance, theatrically visceral, traumatic even; you could literally hear a pin drop in the audience. The shivering scenery of “Butterfly”, its thorns and snakes half butterfly / half window, living outside of itself as she finds new totems of expressive release, words living a different life to the studio versions – here they are more fragmented, physically under-pinned.

Clenched mic in hand, Keeley’s body fights with itself, muttering secretively, spiked in unsettling laughter; she slides across the back wall, knots into the words she sings as that droning melancholy of the harmonium-like organ and cello spider her twisting hands and elongated fingers. Song after song inhabit their own inner turmoil, some sepia-soaked and sorrowful, others a tightly gristled fist of something repugnant released to a downward palm.

 

The tension is superb, scary even, an utterly compelling tour de force illuminated in tram-line sparks and a dirge-like rub that arrows the doomed romantic in us all as the ever-questioning self is constantly re-examined, made tactile in trembling vibrato.

“Everything is rushing by too fast”, she laments, her words seemingly falling back into that blackened void of mouth, caged in strands of hair. She conducts the air above her head like a hidden halo, curves her hands around her face, spikes her palm repeatedly with pointed fingers. Lying on the floor, singing up to the ceiling, Keeley questions “is this what madness feels like?”.

The final track’s electric piano answering that question in deepest jet, a moonless night which has Keeley standing facing the wall like an eerie Hiroshima blast shadow, merging with the smoke as piano and cello ruminate a poignant demise.

An amazing show, vividly burnt into the memory banks.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-