Live Review : A.A. Williams + Elle Mary at the Halle St.Peters, Manchester on September 30th 2021

I’m late and lost. Ancoats is a labyrinth-esque playground for mancunian’s hip and trendy twenty-somethings. Given that I am soon to enter my sixtieth decade on this planet, I haven’t got a clue where I am going. I finally discover Halle St. Peters to find it bathed in reverential hush. Local lass Elle Mary is bearing her soul and you can hear even the very inkling of a dropping pin. I surreptitiously creep in, awakening memories of trying to sneak in late to assembly without catching the headmaster’s eye. 

Elle is a slight girl with a large guitar, and she has striped everything back to the bone. This is confessional song writing at its best, the melodies are sweet, but the words are barbed. The penultimate track hurls around f-bombs like they are thermal detonators. We don’t get to learn who has done her wrong, but it is obvious that Elle is very much one to bear grudges. It’s not all tales of woe and harsh heartbreak, there is a sweet, almost life-affirming track dedicated to her mum and a wonderfully dry comic moment when upon learning that no one in audience has heard of the artist she is covering for the final track, she decides to pass it off as her own. Overall, she is engaging and compelling.

As you can guess this is not a usual haunt for us at ROCKFLESH , but A.A. Williams is no ordinary artist. Last year’s “Forever Blue” was a pulsating supernova of dark brooding fragility.` It peeled away all of metal’s unnecessary trappings, but retained its raw emotive heart. This is the much-delayed headline tour to support the record and Alex is determined to make up for lost time. The staging is minimal. She has one solitary backlite A placed behind her and the band, it’s as if they were going to put her entire name up in lights but run out of cash when they had done the first letter. The performance is equally stark and sparing. Opener ‘All I Asked for (Was to End it All)’ slowly builds full of malicious dread. It seems to be heading towards a crashing crescendo, but then fades out to nothing like some great calamity has been avoided. 

Whilst she is surrounded by a gaggle of highly competent musicians, this is very much the A.A. Williams show. She is a hypnotic presence, equally authoritarian and fragile. She is at the forefront of everything this evening and like Elle Mary before her, you get the feeling that she is lay out the content of her heart in front of us.  She is not keeping anything back, every dark secret and every forbidden desire is dragged out and placed in front of our voyeuristic gaze. ‘I’m Fine’ is especially harsh and haunting. Alex moves left of stage to the keys and unfurls “Forever Blues” raw and emotive closing track. You can hear the pain, but you can also feel the healing. The bloodletting that is her highly personnel song-writing feels cathartic and part of a natural recuperation. For all its darkness, there is so much hope and redemption in her music.

There is also something wonderfully restrained about what she is doing. You can feel the power and the rage, but it is carefully regulated. This evening ‘Fearless’ and ‘Belong’ are welded together and seem to morph into a single linear piece of music. At several points it feels like they want to burst out of their cage and become searing soaring metal tracks. But they are kept under strict control, allowed to show a minimum of teeth but no more. It is that constraint that builds the atmosphere. The air feels close, like a storm is brewing but never materialising.

Tonight, we get literally everything she has. All eight tracks from “Forever Blue” and all four tracks from the self-titled follow up EP. Her lockdown inspired covers are ignored and in many ways that this the right thing to do as tonight is about Alex, her demons, and her redemption. We close with “Forever Blue’s” sprawling minimalistic masterpiece ‘Melt’. As ever she is simultaneously reserved and dripping with emotion. The ethereal sound whips around her, like great tornados of primal passion. And then they are gone, the tempest is abated and once again she has laid her beasts to rest. Tonight, was about power in small measures, it was about the intensity of emotion and was about how one woman (and her band) can create so much with so little. Stunning, simply stunning.