MUSIC
Steve Lacy
Sydney Opera House, January 31
Also, February 1 and St Jerome’s Laneway Festival, February 4.
Reviewed by JAMES JENNINGS
★★★½
If you were a musician performing and a largely teenage crowd was screaming at ear-bleeding, rafter-shaking volume during your first song, it’s unlikely you’d think “this needs to be taken up a notch”.

Yet, Steve Lacy, the 25-year-old genre-hopping Californian the audience is baying for, does exactly that by boldly pivoting from alternative R&B opener Static to an instrumental of Rage Against the Machine’s 1992 shot of audio adrenaline, Killing in the Name Of, raising the intensity to breaking point.

It’s indicative of a show that cycles through the most loved songs in Lacy’s catalogue – highlights include the funk-flavoured Helmet, bossa-nova standout Mercury and the falsetto Prince-isms of Playground – but also has a playful looseness.

Lacy spends a generous amount speaking to fans, most of whom scream wildly at the smallest of gestures – Lacy saying his name, taking a sip of water or simply picking up a guitar. He takes requests from the rabid crowd, playing solo on guitar while his powerhouse three-piece band take a break.

Considering so many shows are rehearsed to within an inch of their lives, it’s disarming to see an artist veer off from the pre-planned setlist and engage with fans to such a degree, but there are times, especially during a few songs in which Lacy indulges in extended guitar solos, that it begins to feel less like joyful spontaneity and more like padding the show out to a respectable 90 minutes.

It also doesn’t help that Lacy’s vocals are mixed too low for most of the performance, an even bigger issue when the audience sings along at top volume.

Minor quibbles aside, Lacy, looking low-key in sunglasses and with a hood pulled tight over his head for the whole show, a brave move on a particularly muggy Sydney day, is an endearing presence, clearly having the time of his life and often dancing along to his music.

Things pull back into focus for the barnstorming final two songs Bad Habit and Dark Red (over two billion combined streams; the former the viral TikTok smash that went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100), the talented Lacy giving the impression that despite his already impressive achievements, the best is still ahead of him.

MUSIC
Raye
Enmore Theatre, January 31
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★½
Maybe some came for a concert: a string of radio hits, millions of real-world sales and a songwriting voice that sparkles with old and new world appeal pulls a crowd. The kind of crowd that cleared out the merch desk long before showtime and hummed with anticipation that could be heard down Enmore Road.

And those on stage looked up for it: the six-piece band decked out in white suits with bowties (the women) and dress shirts and bowties (the men); the evening’s host in full-length shimmer; the trumpet and saxophone frontline contributors, not background colour for a synth wash; the voice seemingly capable of anything.

But what we got, to borrow a phrase from a friend who was deep in the throng and deep in infatuation, was a hang. What we got was a medium-size theatre reshaped as a living room sprawl where a “show of honesty” mixed South London banter, frank confessions and extended digressions with musical selections from what might have been the coolest record collection, not a debut album.

Mind you, a debut that is not the work of a naif packaged for consumption, but someone who has had to wait her turn, warehoused by a label which, while milking her songwriting for others, didn’t know what to do with her. But Raye – Rachel Keen – knew what to do. This much is very clear.

This record collection in Raye’s temporary living room gave us swinging brassy soul with some scat and free-form vocalising over the top (Thrill Is Gone), and soul folding into R&B in a song that was a buoyant middle finger to the men who blocked and chopped up her early career (Hard Out Here). It brought in George Benson-style silky jazz as a showcase for the fluidity of her voice (Worth It) and a song fiercely burning in deceptively gentle colours that squared sexual assault and the masquerades of coping mechanisms (Ice Cream Man).

It went to ’90s clubland and ’70s balladry separately (Black Mascara and Natalie Don’t), to Las Vegas cabaret and New York attitude simultaneously (Oscar Worthy Tears) and suggested what Eartha Kitt’s Latin soul might have felt like with Shirley Bassey’s lungs (Five Star Hotel).

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Cracking stuff that’s old school but fresh and blurs generations.

But with a hang there’s a trade-off to be made for the relaxed pleasures. All the chat, the opening up and connecting, the amusing and the moving, meant there were only eight (not long) songs in the first hour. There was a 20-minute solo spot at the piano taking requests – done as excerpts – which meandered a little beyond relaxed. There was a real sense that the show regularly teetered on, or crossed over, the edge of blunted momentum.

Some issues, yes. But, jeez, she’s good. Can write. Can sing. Can charm. Hanging with Raye is fun.

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