The stunning setting of Oxford’s Town Hall demands a quality and a beauty to music played there, with the pipe organ rising behind the act and kaleidoscopic lights dancing off the chandelier hanging above the stage. It is stunning, and I would be hard pushed to claim acts aren’t well chosen l to blend with this beautiful room.
Daughter broke onto the scene gradually, releasing EPs in 2010 and 2011 and finally issuing If You Leave, their full length album, in March. The album is sublime, beautiful, and heart wrenching. Elena Tonra takes your hand and leads you through the pain of her life, whimpering or murmuring as demanded. That one person, one relationship perhaps, could generate such flawlessly expressed pain seems unreasonable, as the lyrical intensity and honesty is matched only by understated guitar scores and driving drum beats which with no lyrics at all are still dripping in loss and loneliness. The band has left themselves room to develop into for later releases, but I find it hard to find significant fault with If You Leave.
These are songs to lose yourself in. As we went through ‘Candles’, ‘Love’, ‘Still’, I could see people around closing their eyes and drifting away with the band. On the occasions I myself had them open, a long channel of short people afford us a clear view of the stage, to see soft synth beats crossing with guitarist Igor Haefeli taking a bow to his instrument. “By the morning/I will have grown back” begs the chorus of ‘Amsterdam’, a highlight for me, and by that fifth song the town hall was taken by the band.
I find it wonderful that such an invocation of one young woman’s grief can touch so many people personally. The music will find sadness in everyone somewhere, whether it’s “Cause this is torturous electricity/Between both of us and this is/Dangerous ’cause I want you so much/But I hate your guts/I hate you” swaying through the chorus of ‘Landfill’ or simply the pain shot through the vibrating vocals on ‘Smother’. The set took a clear move towards songs off the album as the evening grew older, rising to meet ‘Youth’, a perfect high point for me and a perfect conclusion to the themes of the show for its stricken comments on the omnipresent touch of loss in youth.
‘Home’, the encore from Liverpool on Monday night, concluded the main set, and the band re-emerged to play their stunning mash-up of Bon Iver’s Perth with Hot Chip’s Ready for the Floor to rapturous applause. An unforgettable end to an unforgettable show.
Soft, crafted melodies on the depths of grief may not be everyone’s ideal gig, but not a soul in the hall could avoid being taken up by, at the very least, the honesty of Elena Tonra. Musically, she ripped her heart out in front of us all, but was almost unbearably shy in between songs, nervously offering thanks and giggling at declarations of love cried from the crowd. Even the more confident Igor Haefeli seemed overwhelmed by the end of the encore. I may not, as one woman cried, love them “like my actual daughter”, but I definitely love them.
