bReview: Jude Kelly

bReview: Jude Kelly 

with Michael Llewellyn 

at Whammy, Saturday 24 May 2025

Written by Isabelle Lloydd

Photography by Afrina Razi 

Saturday night at Whammy Bar in St Kevin’s Arcade starts slowly. I am early, perhaps the fourth person to slip behind the ubiquitous bar door - a heavy slab of black paint. The stairs are dusted in glitter. The floor is scuffed, the bar top caramelised with light from hooded lamps. I talk to a friendly bartender, an event manager, one of the sound guys Mark (who praises the band from sound check). The event is almost booked out.

About forty minutes later comes the opening act: Michael Llewellyn, singing from his newly released second album I’m Gorgeous, with a second guitarist, Aaron. The gentle cadence of his songs, guided by Llewellyn’s husky, slow-song voice, should have lulled the audience into quiet. To his misfortune, some members of the crowd don't want to be, and constrict the space left for us to listen. Nonetheless, Llewellyn perseveres with dreamy, contemplative vocals that will prove to delicately juxtapose the main act. Each song flowers slowly, easing its listeners into a warm bath of layered guitars, with lyrics that echo, repeat, expand.

Llewellyn’s songs think of love in the gentlest way - nostalgically, gently, reverentially. On the startlingly named Stalin, we are immersed in a meditation on how love shapes us, and what can happen when perhaps it isn’t there to. The song’s vocals are shy, hesitant, overlapping personal experience with museful historical reflection. In the repeated line, Oh I think I like you, I think I love you, love’s (and life’s) irrevocable state of uncertainty is succinctly encapsulated.  

(Michael Llewellyn opening for Jude Kelly at Whammy / Photo: Afrina Razi) 

Llewellyn describes the album as about “grappling with the masks we wear…the chaos and push and pull between love and anger.” Yet the album never feels angry, instead largely peaceful. Llewellyn sings to us about manliness, about masks, and the notion of being free; he attempts to elucidate the pretences we act out in the dichotomy between real and projected self. He illustrates the part that love plays in realising this conflict, if not absolving it altogether.

In the changeover between acts, the light cools, sound flooding from the bar speakers, gritty and thick. The air is bitter with vape smoke. The audience thickens. 9:40 p.m. ticks over, the air tightening with anticipation. Jude Kelly and her band materialise suddenly on stage. It’s an adverb that shapes the night, in a performance of her masterful debut EP The Seven Spirits of Her that constantly changes tack.

The multiplicities of Jude Kelly's music are reflected in the personas she brings to the stage. As the night ages, I watch the gradual transition from an artist who is put-together, aloof, beautiful, to someone wild - alive and impassioned, a kind of divine might bleeding through her voice. Raised by two pastors as the youngest of five children in Dunedin, Jude's unique beginnings lurk beneath the lyrics of this EP. They shine through vocals that seem built for soaring spaces, grasping at something we can't see.

(Jude Kelly at Whammy / Photo: Afrina Razi) 

In Siren Song, Kelly’s voice is trancelike, resonant, and rich. The soundscape is high and orchestral one moment, American country-folk the next. Her grasp of pitch in an EP that constantly undulates is exceptional. She shakes off her jacket and sways into the stitching of the song, knowing it’ll hold. It's a stage presence that appears inherent rather than learnt. The stage holds five people on the same wavelength, a single sonic body. Skilfully complementing Jude, the band is en pointe the entire night, unerring and polished. 

Soon we reach Bonnet Bunny. The room is electric. Jude sings from the keyboard, supported by three guitarists. It's sung softly at first, a voice out of focus, before abruptly escalating into colour. It changes again, becoming delicate, sugar-like, guitar strings dusting the air and splintering. There is a cultish power to her voice; the soundscape feels hymnal, a sense of the divine transcended into something lifelike, tangible.

Her voice leads us into each song in relative solitude, suspended against diaphanous background noise. Then sound bursts its seams. Jude describes The Seven Spirits of Her as expressing “different energy stages.” These are perfectly summarised in an EP full of explosions and sudden volume changes, whereby the audience is rushed through a theme park of swooping, plunging vocals to be left wondering when it ended.

In Lucky, the EP’s final track, insecurity is unpicked. First comes the keyboard, a high and lingering electronic note before the scrape of guitar strings. Jude’s voice is loaded and liquid. Lucky is complemented by Like You, a song Jude tells us was born from the fearful experience of feeling something for someone again. It is sorrowful, beautiful. The room is infused with a tentative hope as Jude questions: how do I fall in love with you? It is just Jude and a pianist. In one moment, Jude’s gaze lingers on them, sings to them. Then the moment dissolves. The song quavers on the last note, hangs there, lengthens.

Jude swiftly subverts the tender aftertaste of this pairing with Married to Her Death, a feminist ballad that burns in the air. The pure, high intro of the song darkens with a rapid gear change into fast, furious lyrics. With dynamic pace, pitch, and narrational prowess, Jude grieves. She builds an image of a woman gradually eroded; a portrait suggesting how our relationships and selves continue to be informed by patriarchal behaviour. Jude sings to every woman in the crowd. It is a song that one feels in their bones. A song that chafes raw against the bar’s walls.

Jude Kelly ends the night with Clarence, a powerhouse song whose sweeping, unchecked grandeur swells the room. On the stage she is ethereal, drenched in pale light. Her dark hair ripples to her waist, her silver cross thrashes in the air. The latitudes of her voice are extraordinary; grazing something celestial, refusing to split open. Clarence searingly disassembles traditions of femininity and howls at the moon. The audience hangs on the last notes of her voice, is drawn down into its canyons and valleys. We are washed up into the remains of the evening, calling for more.

Emerging onto the street afterwards, ears ringing, I run into 95bFM’s own General Manager Tom Tremewan. He recalls Jude Kelly in the boxing ring years ago, a force to be reckoned with. It’s easy math.

Jude Kelly’s sound is characterised by hairpin turns and a voice like a wishing well - unlimited and replete with promise. There is the sense of a bigger world in the expansive sound of Jude Kelly: an artist who, against the laid back atmosphere of a K-Road staple, is perhaps trying to fit into a space that is already too small for her. An artist who is doing so with grace.

(Jude Kelly at Whammy / Photo: Afrina Razi) 

The set list was as follows:

Monster Truck

Siren Song

Merrily (unreleased)

Do You Love Me Now (Breeders cover)

Bonnet Bunny

Lucky

Like You

Married To Her Death

Clarence