Live At The Voodoo Lounge, Dublin

What’s a nice girl like her doing in a… well, okay, the Voodoo Lounge ain’t no dump, but it is your quintessentially dim-lit and cheerfully scuzzy north quay rock ‘n’ roll haunt. The choice of venue, not to mention the decision to spend a week playing clubs around the country, means that Juliette Lewis’s martyr-for-the-cause credentials can’t be called into question. The movie pedigree might open doors and get her a slot on the Meteor Awards, but this is obviously no moonlighting actor brat breezing in to play the swish palaces and then absconding with a satchel of cash. She also looks the genuine article, coming onto the cramped stage like she just stepped out of a negative print of the Horses cover: black shirt, white tie, tousled rats nest and white Cuban heels. You can add to that a powerful pair of pipes, ferocious stage presence and a backing band of workmanlike but mercilessly road-drilled post punk and hard rock pros who compensate in sweat what they lack for in character.
But as of yet, those co-writing sessions with Linda Perry haven’t yielded a hit. The metallic Moroder rhythms of ‘Got Love To Kill’ are certainly intriguing, but ‘Shelter Your Needs’ and ‘20 Year Old Lover’ are apt to confuse slogans with hooks. That said, the blustery power pop of the opening ‘You’re Talking My Language’, the gratifyingly rowdy ‘So Amazing’ and one rather delectable slowie in the Motels vein suggest she’ll get there.
So, the length of the set (50 minutes with encore) might have afforded the paying punter reason to grumble, but this listener was grateful for her horse sense. As of yet Ms Lewis just doesn’t have the material to carry much more than an hour, but it’s early days and that NBK/Kalifornia/Cape Fear cache, lung-power and general fearlessness in the face of the great unwashed (crowd-surfing – cool!) are enough currency to buy time with. Let’s see what happens when the album drops.

Photograph by Cathal Dawson.