A lot of female singer/ songwriters playing in the folk and roots and pop scene have a very similar sound, other have ‘it.’ Pender Island based, Calgary raised songwriter Lauren Mann is one of the latter.
She was playing for a good sized and attentive Wednesday night audience at the Slice.
While I missed opening act Whitebird (though one half of the Pender Island duo was playing bass with Mann), I arrived just in time for a riveting set from Lauren Mann and her hot band the Fairly Odd Folks (this time Whitebird bassist Matthew DesRoches, drummer Darryl Swart and keyboardist Adam Gill.) I could immediately hear why she received so much attention from the CBC Searchlight competition followed by the Peak Performance competition in 2014.
It was the first show of their tour, but you wouldn’t know if she hadn’t told us as they didn’t miss a note. Her black clad, fedora sporting band mates blended into the black backdrop of the Slice.
Mann sat front and centre in front of her piano, dressed in a red blouse and long white skirt and didn’t address the audience until after a few songs in. She reminded me a little of Sarah Burton with a touch of Sue Foley.
She played several songs off her sophomore CD “Over Land and Sea,” switching to a tenor ukulele as her keyboardist Adam Gill took over her piano to play the song’s signature addictive earworm of a riff.
After some more upbeat numbers, she slowed things down for more sombre, introspective, multi-layered ethereal pop influenced numbers like including the hypnotic “Barren Land” and some brand new songs which may appear on her next CD.
She switched between ukulele and piano, picking up the ukulele, for a haunting version of David Bowie’s “ Space Oddity.”
