Carla Lippis: New Songs for the New World | Adelaide Fringe 2021 review

Make as many comparisons as you like, but the truth remains that Carla Lippis is a wholly original and formidable talent.

Carla Lippis – New Songs for the New World. Picture: Supplied by Adelaide Fringe

Carla Lippis: New Songs for the New World

Music / SA

Rating: *****

Chamber, The Queens

Until March 20

Rock chanteuse revolutionary Carla Lippis is amused by the labels people have applied to her stage persona, calling her everything from “the cabaret Joe Pesci” to “the bogan Liza Minnelli”. They’re not wrong.

Let’s add a few more, inspired by this blistering set of New Songs for the New World, which have been fermenting in her dark mind during lockdown.

Striking regime-like propaganda poses and grimacing with sinister intent as she delivers a semi-spoken tirade over the pulsing bass and keys, rattling snare and wailing guitar of her band, wild-eyed Lippis is an even more loopy Lene Lovich for the post-pandemic paranoia period.

“I like to make angry music,” she tells anyone who can still hear after the opening number.

No kidding – but there is beauty in her anger and revelation to be found in her revolution.

What follows next owes more to the psychedelic ’60s in its pop melody, twangy guitar reverb and her breathy, hypnotic vocals … like an antsy Nancy Sinatra.

Then it’s off to an attic in Italy for some beautiful romance, with a dash of French chanson … making her the Napoleon of Neapolitan Canzone?

There’s some more rock fury before we settle into a bracket of exquisite, dramatic ballads with soaring vocals that could pass for James Bond themes by a brassier Shirley Bassey.

It ends with a tumultuous metal crunch as Lippis repeatedly declares I’m A Liar, channelling her own personal demon like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

Make as many comparisons as you like, but the truth remains that Carla Lippis is a wholly original and formidable talent.

Stick around after Saturday night’s show to see her host Club Queens.