Martha Wainwright is fascinating to behold. She fills the stage with her normal physique, shrouded by her plain clothes, topped off by her straw-like bleach-blonde hair.
She is not beautiful. She does not care. Legs well apart, she gyrates rhythmically against her guitar, giving the impression that she sings as much from her pelvic floor region, as from her other lips. Swooning and soaring, her voice dives to unexpected places, gaining speed with quick repetition and simultaneous buttock-wobbling, before belting out a single line, holding the note and tautening her leg muscles, to the climax – ‘but it’s plain to see that the problem is, is, is in me’.
The Wainwright dynasty is well known for the great music it has engendered out of a long-standing chip on the shoulder. Its pater familias, Loudon Wainwright III, enjoyed early comparisons to Bob Dylan, but chose a more distinctive course, one which frequently involved parodying himself.
Walking a lyrical tightrope between the humorous and the absurd, Wainwright set the trend of writing familial discord into country & folk. His children, with the right mix of rehab and neuroses, have followed suit.
Written during his son Rufus’ early years, ‘Rufus Is A Tit Man’, exhibited a certain ironic prescience, and in relation to daughter Martha, the less jovial ‘Hitting You’, recalled a moment of parental discipline gone awry.
Freudian analysis would find it unremarkable, then, that his preferred method of communicating what might be better left unsung, should result in his offspring realising a musical career along similar lines.
Martha Wainwright shot to coffee shop fame in a duet with Snow Patrol, casting a sheer luminosity onto Gary Lightbody’s popular drawl. The fragility of her voice in ‘Set the Fire to the Third Bar’ is entirely unlike of her music today, and would have you believe that she pitches in somewhere between Mazzy Star and Chan Marshall. Her earliest release, a four-song EP entitled Factory was suggestive of those two, her recent album I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too has testified to her being more of a Daddy’s girl.
Frank disclosure qualifies both her stage persona and many of her lyrics, as Wainwright combines a dulcet country twang with coarse language and revealing witticisms, ‘These are not my people, tomorrow should never have come here / The chick with a dick and the gift for the gab’.
Written in her twenties, these songs arose from the pathos that coloured her personal life and invaded performances. However the 32 year old standing before us now is clearly happy, and as such the angst-ridden numbers resonate less.
Unfortunately every silver lining has its cloud, and as Wainwright relentlessly drones ‘You cheated me and I can’t believe it/I’ve been calling since four o’clock last night,’ with her husband strumming away in the background, what could be ironic just becomes tedious.
Martha Wainwright doesn’t give a fuck. Not in the affected way that one might expect from someone who wrote an ode to their father entitled ‘Bloody Mother-Fucking Asshole’. She is so comfortable on stage that the consummate ease with which she commands proceedings makes the audience almost superfluous. She would be doing everything in exactly the same way if this were only a rehearsal, but that is not to say she is slipshod. Actually she is flawless. In amongst all her imperfect features and her stable life, so incongruous with the genre she best fits, is an indefatigable voice.
