bReview: Mousey at Neck of the Woods
Saturday 23 November 2024
Words by Sean Hollier
Photography by Maanika Narsai
It’s saturday night on Karangahape Road and the mood is apocalyptic. On the ground, a sparse stretch of passersby amble by posters for gigs long finished. In the sky, a palette of grey and charcoal fills the half-sphere. As I make my way to Neck of The Woods, I wonder if the grim feeling in the air can be attributed to the long, economically motivated decay of the city, or just the shitty weather. Who knows.
Heading down the stairs at Neck of The Woods always feels like entering some kind of underworld. Or dungeon. The lack of external windows and near-total darkness makes time move differently. Last time I was here, for The Butler’s Tour, the room was packed wall to wall with bodies. Tonight is less intense, maybe twenty five people or so.
I shuffle into a spot against a thick concrete pillar—an enduring feature of Auckland venues—and before long the opener of the night, Goodwill, steps up onto the stage. With his short brown hair and olive green shirt he’s got a sort of Shaggy vibe about him. But any association with the mystery-solver is demolished as he begins to sing; Goodwill has this lovely bassy singing voice that rumbles the room whenever he hits a low note. It’s just him and his guitar up on the stage with no backing band, but he has no trouble transfixing the crowd as he floats through a handful of songs, mostly off his most recent album Kind Hands.
For the perhaps the first time of my life, I’m glad for the small crowd. Watching the performance, which is much more stripped down than his recorded material, feels like sharing a secret. It’s intimate. Goodwill seems into it too, as he retunes his guitar between tracks, he unhurriedly chats to the audience about the venue’s overexcited smoke machine (‘sounds like someone’s playing a high hat down there’) and the Air New Zealand safety video he saw on the plane over (‘I’m pretty sure I saw uh, Steven Adams in there’). At some point, the sky must have finally opened up on the street above as, as the set reaches its back half, we’re treated the sound of rainfall on the roof, just barely audible above the instrumentation and vocals.
As Goodwill finishes his final song, the smoke machine decides to go for really go for it and releases a comically thick cloud that ominously crawls towards the stage. No one else in the crowd seems to notice as they hang onto his every word.
From the time he exits the stage to the beginning of the main event, the room begins to really fill in and resemble the Neck of The Woods I remember. Soon, Mousey and her backing band ascend onto the stage to a wave of cheers from a packed audience. Having listened to her album, The Dreams of Our Mother’s Mothers!, earlier in the week I expect something low, heavy, and slow but the drums immediately burst into a pulsating machine-like rhythm as Mousey’s excellent vibrato floats on the droning guitar and bass lines. They’re very loud, each snare hit makes me flinch for the first track or two, but their intensity adds a new hypnotic feeling to the sound.
(Mousey at Neck of the Woods / Photo: Maanika Narsai)
The band powers through a number of tracks from the new record, including standouts ‘Island of Hope, Pt.2’—which serves as an optimistic palette cleanser against the darkness of the other songs—and Dog Park, the leading single for the album. As the set goes on, band members filter off: first the drums, and then the guitar and bass, leaving Mousey alone to play the final tune. She has to hide from the audience for a moment before she does, clearly a little nervous in front of such an audience, but once she returns she sails through it with no problems.
There's a final applause and then, before I can catch my thoughts, the crowd disperses. The moment is over. A little pocket of warmth against the cold of the city disintegrates into the wind. Thank you to the Mousey and company for such a good time and thank god for music.
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