$15 /// 8:00 pm
Chicago's Thompson Springs stops in Christchurch promoting their new single, Outta Range!
PBS called the band “a mix of indie folk with a southern/western feel,” and Detroit Public Radio (WDET) noted that they pull influences from classic songwriters, like Tom Petty, to more recent indie artists, like Kurt Vile. Thompson Springs started working with Wilco’s Pat Sansone for their debut album, Undertones, which they released on the band's own label, Dropped Beauty Recordings in 2021.
Emily Fairlight has a proper folk singer’s background, having been, among other things, a teenage runaway adventurer in Australia and India, a circus school student, a barista and a runner turned jack-of-all-trades at a digital visual effects company.
Although its New Zealand rural Gothic/Texas borderlands feel make Mother of Gloom an elusive creature, the prevalence of acoustic guitar and intimate sharing of lived experience point to what Fairlight self-deprecatingly calls, “doom-folk”.
Her vocal style - a powerful quivering vibrato and a stark, haunting tone, teak-hard yet soft as crushed velvet - elicits comparisons to PJ Harvey, Bridget St John, Emmylou Harris and Cat Power, musicians with distinctive voices and the lyrical power to conjure a kind of experiential realism.
