Orla Gartland grins and bears it at the Armory on Thursday, 7 November 2024.

Emma Harner gets mathy, gets folky in the opening slot.

A few words on Emma Harner before I turn it over to the live review at my Cambridge Day gig. She played a solo opening set, full of ambitious guitar runs that rated degrees of difficulty way higher than was needed to please the singalong poppers in the crowd. But that’s Harner’s prerogative, and when I looked up her music later I saw it self-described as “math folk.” Which might be a little tongue-in-cheek, but I totally get it. And when it worked, it slayed. Watching her set was a little like watching a skateboarding competition at the Olympics. A lot of gnarly tricks – and they don’t all land – but you’ll never get the gold by playing it safe.

The slogan for the night was: “The show will go on.”

Pop sensation Orla Gartland regaled a sold-out Armory last Thursday with a set that proved you only need two things to make a show sparkle: a kickass artist and a kickass audience. It’s just about the connection between the two, and you can forget about the rest if you have that. The lights, the props, the gimmicks, the hype – all of it.

And you can forget about the sound too, which might seem counterintuitive at a music concert, but Gartland proved that a musician can rise above a faulty PA if the energy in the room is just right. Woeful technical issues bedeviled the Armory soundboard, cutting out the speakers midsong more than once, twice, and thrice. Lucky for all involved, the throbbing vessels of adulation in the crowd knew the songs so well off her latest LP Everybody Needs A Hero that the fans filled in the blanks with their own chorus.

Gartland can play the popstar when she wants to, leaning into catchy refrains and soaking up the adoration of a room full of young women, canoodling couples, and cool dads bring their little girls to their first concert. But the texture of her music is more Haim than Jem (Truly Outrageous!), and the text is anything beside vapid pop sloganeering.

A solo acoustic performance of “Mine” proved the haunting emotional climax of the evening. The song, which is subject to interpretation, but sounds for all the world like a victim of abuse sharing her story, stopped the room in its tracks.

Played like a lullaby, Gartland serenaded her finger picking with a voice that mixed equal parts frailty and strength, until the final upward ascending note tipped the balance in favor of an uncontested, if quiet, victory. You could nearly see the young women in the crowd tipping over the front of the toes, leaning into a kind of shared trauma, and wondering whether they could find in themselves the same strength that they see in the singer on stage.

Emma Harner opened with a solo set of math folk. Which is a subgenre I’ve never heard of, but listening to the complex progressions she produced made me see in a flash the gorgeous possibilities.

More of that please!

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