[ATTENDED: March 26, 2017] Gabriella Cohen
I typically check out who is opening for a show before I get to the show. I never had a chance to look up Gabriella Cohen beforehand, so I had no idea what to expect.
When she first came out it was just her with her guitar and her bandmate Kate ‘Babyshakes’ Dillon on backing vocals (red lights are really harsh for a camera phone it seems–very hard to not get a blurry pic). They sang a song together which was simple but charming (it seemed to be about a breakup). They made me smile as they tried to figure out which side Kate should stand on. And while Gabriella’s playing and singing were fine, I was delighted with Kate’s backing vocals–soaring and high.
When the song was over she told us that the rest of her band would be coming out. Kate walked over to the keyboards and strapped on a guitar of her own and then Arun Roberts came out on bass and Danni Ogilvie played drums.
In the span of their 40 minutes they played five or six songs–it wasn’t clear how many, because it seemed like maybe one or two might have stopped and then started again. A couple of them were really slow, long bluesy songs. 
Lyrically it seemed like most of the songs repeated a phrase quite a lot.
In the first full band song, Cohen played a pretty ripping guitar solo, but in all of the later songs she seemed to be fumbling around hitting single notes, almost failing to decide where to play.
In fact everything about her seemed uncertain. She changed what song she was going to play after announcing it. She said she was supposed to talk about Wawas with us but never did. She said something the band were going play one more song because they had to… and just drifted off. It was strange. She also said that Philly’s cheese was much stronger than she was used to and she was feeling loopy because of it. I wasn’t sure if that was slang or a nod to Philly cheese steaks. And yet, she never seemed nervous–it never came across as shy, just…odd.
They were kind of goofy and charming in a weird way (the person next to me after their set said that their personalities saved them). 
Like when Gabriella and Kate stood next to each other in rock guitar poses but neither one did much of anything and Gabriella actually played almost amateurishly.
Or when Kate told us we could choose to be a banana (I hadn’t mentioned thus far that they are Australian, so here’s a good video with Kate’s accent).
Most of the songs had a kind of garagey girl-group vibe. Gabriella was in a band called The Furrs (whom I had never heard of but who seem to have one album out, so it’s kind of funny to have this on her bandcamp site: “You may know her as the front woman of rock ‘n’ roll band, The Furrs.”) Anyhow, both women’s vocals were echoed so it often sounded like there were more than one person singing, and that was kind of cool. Most of the songs were kind of groovy and danceable. The whole set was…good.
Although all through the show I kept thinking that I was enjoying Kate’s singing and playing more. Turns out that she has her own group called Full Flower Moon Band which I was pretty excited to hear. But that EP doesn’t play up her strengths in any way, sadly. It’s pretty much all drowned out in reverb and noise–if you had a voice like that, why would you cover it up?
Leave a Reply