We Mavericks – Kumeu Live, May 21, 2022 (Concert Review)

We Mavericks are Folk duo Victoria Vigenser from Auckland and Lindsay Martin from New South Wales, and tonight at the boutique Art gallery and intimate music venue in Boganville (Auckland’s Wild West), they lay out timeless acoustic Roots music featuring their sophomore album Grief’s a Gardener, released last year.

Vigenser caught our ears over the last few years as an arresting Celtic Soul voice, playing her own songs in various small venues and Folk clubs around town. Last seen by myself at a Rafters show in a Ponsonby church, saying she was off to Australia to seek her fortune.

Which turned out to be Martin. A veteran musician of everything. A virtuoso on mandolin and violin, with a long background in the Aussie Bluegrass scene. The Bill Monroe trade tool and the Blue (Moon) Mountains of Sydney.

The pairing is a progeny of the pandemic. Commenting on the last two years, Martin’s heart appears to be in the glorious present, as he talks about the huge interest generated amongst the various Festivals in the Big Country that are now full steam ahead. The pair are in-demand musicians at current home base Wollongong.

They were one of the headline acts at this year’s Auckland Folk Festival, sadly falling by the wayside as all the iconic Kiwi festivals got canned this last summer season.

That’s our gift this evening.

They begin singing Safe In This Lonesome Valley. He has a familiar soft Folk tenor. She has a stronger ringing tone with muscle behind a clear crystalline voice. Martin informs us that he also recognised a need to bring Vigenser’s voice front and centre. Up to then she had been accompanying and staying in the background.

Hard Work is led out by a gracious mandolin break. Written with the victims of bushfires in mind. Digger dug me a grave/ Saved someone else from doing the job. The context has become wider. Their songs reflect some of their activism with social observation and protest themes.

Graveyard comes from meditations in a cemetery. Vigenser opens out a little more, sounding like Linda Thompson in tone and reminding us of the halcyon times of that legendary pairing with then husband Richard Thompson.

Melancholia is another way to describe traditional Folk. It’s also at the heart of Roots Americana. Perfectly describes Negative, a song about loss. The mandolin sounding Old Time Country.    

Not Gonna Be. They head into American Country fully, singing not gonna be an alcoholic ‘cause that’s what my daddy did. The violin cries for her and the harmony vocals are divine.

The Gap is the title track of their first album and addresses the poverty gap. Folksingers’ activism of a similar sensibility to Billy Bragg.

Similar sentiments on They Will. The violin plays phrases similar to a saxophone and it swings to the cadences of Klezmer Jazz.

Our Boat and they wind up the tempo into a dance reel.

Broke Her is rhythmically charged even though the subject matter is grim. A monster in the saddle/ Broke her in and broke her down/ A badly treated warhorse. This could be an Anzac song in the same sense as the music which followed the American Civil War. Most of that music came from Scottish and Irish Celtic traditions. Which is how ethnographers and music enthusiasts came to find authentic British Folk music preserved in the Appalachian Ranges, and not in the ancestral home countries.

They end the evening in a similar vein with Victoria’s voice adding some keening passion on a Scottish ballad, Mickey’s Warning. He’s worse than the devil/ When he gets home, I get battered. The violin is there to lift the spirit and exorcise that demon (which is alcohol of course) and it finishes with a fast reel.

We Mavericks are a serendipitous pairing of Kiwi Victoria Vigenser and Ocker Lindsay Martin, coming together in a particularly fraught period of history. They have generated excitement in the Folk scene in Australia in just a short time, and we are catching up with that now.

Rev Orange Peel  

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