bReview: Wiri Donna at Double Whammy
Saturday 23 November 2024
Words by Imogene Bedford
Photography by Shreya Walthati
The red mānuka, or “wiri donna,” is a native flower that blooms year-round. It’s a fitting name for an indie-rock goddess as multidimensional as Wiri Donna.
95bFM is lucky to be reviewing the artist as she plays Tāmaki’s Double Whammy: armed with smudged eyeliner and a deep loathing for my last talking stage, I’m feeling appropriately prepared to represent the station as I arrive.
It’s not to last. In an incredibly humbling moment, the person on doors can’t find my name. I stand there like a total mug while he checks once, twice, then thrice. The review seems to be over before it has even begun, until – a second door list is located. Thank fuck.
With entry secured, I watch the first act tune. Salt Water Criminals is on warm up duties tonight, and the band wastes no time thawing us out with their first song.
Existentialist headbanger Temporary immediately sets a gritty tone with an urgent riff and punchy drum accents. Full of distorted chords that evoke early Dinosaur Jr, the track is as vulnerable as it is sardonic.
This volatility is pretty characteristic of the band’s 2023 album House of Highs. Reuben Scott started the project in his Ōtepoti bedroom, and the record is punctuated by his anxious lyricism and abrupt tonal shifts. The emotional richness of his performance of The Adult (Falls Apart) reminds me of Car Seat Headrest, staggering from thunderous to soft and back again.
Yet comparison really is the thief of joy, because Salt Water Criminals is too dynamic to define. Their alt-emo sound is tinged with the influences of the member’s other projects. Mitchell Innes, Louis Graham, and Damin McCabe feature distinctively on the band’s new track, promising of exciting things to come from one of Tāmaki’s most intriguing bands.
The tight set ends with My Greatest Achievement, a track labored with feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. “I wanna look like I know what I’m doing, more than I wanna know what I’m doing,” Reuben sings. The energy is so intense a seccie steps in to ask a couple of punters to be more aware of their dancing.
My ears ringing, I hit the smokers, where I’m promptly scolded by my mate. “Fuck you need ear plugs,” he says, like an eerie echo of every Loop Engage ad I have ignored over the last year. Humbled for the second time tonight, I lamely make out I’m built different, only to eat my words during the second act.
Soft Bait’s sound is, shockingly, anything but soft. Though vocalist Josh Hunter is a brooding figure in all black, tonight’s set is strikingly energetic. He has no trouble vacillating between angry and anguished: on True Stories, he has the same squallishness as Mark E. Smith, but on Legs, he has all the richness of Peter Murphy.
Watching them perform, it’s hard to believe the band’s 2022 album Plot Points is at times reserved and gothic. Josh dedicates one song to Salt Water Criminals, Salt Lake City and salt & vinegar chips. “You’re simply the best…Salt Water Criminals,” he quips as he sings.
I get the sense the post-punk quartet is deceptively earnest. Dancing in the mosh, it becomes obvious why punk is currently having such a renaissance. For all their acidic bravado, Soft Bait’s music is primarily about giving a shit.
With Patrick Hickley on guitar, Keria Paterson on bass, and Cameron MacKintosh on drums, the band rails against societal conformity through a punky wall of noise. Big skewers consumerism while No Bad Days maligns the monotony of capitalist existence. Despite their nihilist surface, there is a hopefulness to the tracks, an urgent sense that they mean every word.
It’s a genuineness Wiri Donna shares as she takes the stage. Despite the fiery imagery that accompanied the release of her recent EP, cheerful frontwoman Bianca Bailey is not an immediately imposing figure. The self-professed “beverage gobbler” says she has three drinks to sip from in-between songs, taking a drink from each before she performs deep cut Dream of Me.
But the room is quickly spellbound as she launches into her furious third track The Gold. Where opener Used To built fuzzy layers of sound, The Gold is appropriately metallic. Evidently too busy dancing to take proper notes, my singular comment reads “fucking meanage.” Poignant!
Bianca’s lyrics are fierce, venting feminine rage with unflinching simplicity as her vocals bring a softness out of the jagged guitars. On both Stop Charades and In My Chambers, this sensitivity is transformed into something quite formidable.
For her funky cover of Lola Young’s Conceited, Bianca puts her fender down and grooves along with her hand on heart. Bassist Harrison Scholes and drummer James MacEwan are stellar here, providing a taut base for Elliott Dawson’s guitar to shine as the song builds to a heavy finish.
All three have been her longtime bandmates and collaborators. With one member of the band moving to London, tonight is probably the last night they will play together in their current form. The crowd cheers supportively while she fights back tears.
Though we plead for one very last song, she says she must respectfully decline as they won’t have pedals. But someone in the crowd – who sounds somewhat suspiciously like another of my mates – shouts “fuck the pedals,” and she relents.
Last Call is slightly more mellow, as promised, a ballad with hints of the folksiness Wiri Donna was originally associated with. It has a nostalgic quality that feels fitting for this goodbye show, the melody lingering with me still later in the night.
As we hit our Saturday night regular, Karangahape’s very own The White Lady, I feel a little less alone and a lot more grateful, impending tinnitus be damned. There’s something spiritual about becoming lost in someone else’s feelings, like we have undergone a collective cleansing: a catharsis.
Perhaps there is really nothing more punk than sincerity.
Thanks to Wiri Donna for having us along! If you want your show or gig reviewed click here to find out how
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