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If the ‘Bliss Avenue’ CD was an interesting introduction to New York’s hard hitting vocalist and songwriter Dana Fuchs, her live show quickly revealed all her qualities.
As she made clear at the outset, her songs deal with ‘the dirty business of life’ and judging by her impassioned performance and spiky lyrics, she’s done her fair share of living.
She hit the crowd hard from the start, demanding that they give her as much back as she gave them on stage. It wasn’t so much a confrontational gesture as just checking that her audience knew what to expect.
She’s a sassy performer with a sandpaper voice, who is equally capable of bringing real emotion to a lyric as much as she is turning an arrangement inside out.
Her command of the stage is pure Broadway and her band refreshingly focussed on the melodic qualities of her songs rather than swamping them with unnecessary solos. They also contributed subtle backing harmonies, while guitarist and co-song writer John Diamond added dynamic colours, various tones and occasional climactic resolutions without once over extending his welcome.
The emphasis was always on Dana. She was a blur of activity, stalking the stage, making exaggerated shapes, crouching down at the front to draw the audience into a lyrical nuance and shaking her considerable mane of curly locks in rock chick mode. She revelled in her extravagant mic technique and tore into her lyrics with a ferocity that makes you wonder about the wear and tear of her voice.
One moment she was a full on rock singer, the next a vulnerable and almost introspective emotional balladeer, while always checking out the crowd to see if they were still with her. And on the rare occasion when she wasn’t certain she simply swore at them New York style, suggesting that whatever the outcome, the band was certainly going to boogie and give it their best shot.
She need not have worried about a response, because most of the songs from her current ‘Bliss Avenue’ album clearly struck a chord with the audience. Dana is a natural communicator given to the occasional extended preamble as on ‘So Hard To Move’ – a deeply moving song about her late brother – and she rarely holds back as evidenced ‘Living On Sunday’, her unflinchingly take on the religious hypocrisy of the south, played out in a rollicking country tinged style.
Each song had an essential a narrative that inhabited a life of its own and as long as Dana was fronting the band the show was never going to be anything less than full on.
The hard hitting ‘Bliss Avenue’ set the tone for the evening both in terms of lyrical content and her raucous performance, as she enunciated a primal scream before the first of several beautifully judged solos from guitarist John Diamond.
The band rocked out on the perceptive relationship song ‘How Did Things Get This Way’ on which she managed to evoke both Janis Joplin and Joan Osborne and she dipped into an unashamed honky-tonk number Nothin’ On My Mind’, rescuing the song from any sugary excesses and imbuing it with lyrical purpose and bite.
Fittingly the set closed with her road song ‘Long Long Game’ and a climactic but ironically titled rock ballad and love song ‘Misery’.
Dana finished the evening introducing her band on her knees at the front of the stage. She’d given everything and now it was the crowd’s turn.
Review by Pete Feenstra
Photos by Noel Buckley
(Middle Photo by Stu Daye)
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