Dea Matrona | Housewife
Night and Day Café, Manchester
Tuesday 14th May 2024
Returning to a Manchester stage for possibly the sixth time, Dea Matrona, divine mothers of Irish Rock and Roll are promoting their new album For Your Sins on a National tour, but can they do it on a balmy and humid Tuesday night? MK Bennett investigates.
The great philosopher Kylie Minogue has often suggested we Step Back In Time, though she may not have had the ghost of Phil Lynott one hundred per cent in mind. The past is relative to your particular art of course, as proven by the support act Housewife, a brilliant bunch of Canadians led by the quiet and charismatic Brighid Fry, a sort of Academic-level Courtney Love, a leader with the common sense or lesser ego to employ brilliance behind and beside her, making the project at least appear to be a collaboration of equals. Their sound is an amalgam of cool and currently uncool, which might be their key power, it is a mix of PJ Harvey, Sheryl Crow, Paramore and The Pretenders with the bite and wit of early Hole, especially in the slightly discordant guitars and fabulous titles (f*ck Around Phase, Patrick Bateman). Logical future superstars.
Dea Matrona (Divine Mother in Celtic mythology) are a rock band from Belfast, consisting of Orlaith and Mollie, two highly gifted musicians, born to do this. Some people are steeped in music, it lives in their bones from the homes they grew up in, celebrations spent around a piano in the parlour, and black-clad aunties with big hair harmonising together. It is written in a way that seems effortless in duality, two heads of the same snake.
They come onstage to a heroes’ return, dressed in a way familiar to anyone who remembers when Rock did not mean Metal, relaxed Rock like Free, Fleetwood Mac and Joan Jett & the Blackhearts. Throwing themselves around the stage like Mick Jagger’s nephews and nieces, the devoted crowd packed into the front, the pick-up boys on guitar and drums going hell for leather, the guitarist in particular, modelling the Dea Matrona merchandise, a dead ringer for Matt Dillon in Rumblefish is the recipient of some good-natured Mancunian banter from the front row.
The set starts with what sounds like a Bewitched homage and is an almost entirely upbeat affair with an all-too-brief acoustic break for some Cowboy and Country time. Kicking off with Stamp On It and Get My Mind Off, there are echoes of First Aid Kit and Eliza Carthy as well as storytellers like Bad Company. Perhaps the greatness here is the selling of modernity to a Rock crowd, as Get My Mind Off could be a Taylor Swift song with little or no change, yet it is still heavy with a beautifully distorted bass line and slide guitar, another reminder that they will fit in well with the young Blues crowd such as When Rivers Meet, Samantha Fish or Kyla Brox.
Did Nobody Ever Love You? Has a Paul Simon/Steely Dan intro before its more usual chorus, the unshowy but pure musicianship rolling like a river, as they swap instruments up front without a care in the world. This is a band that could support Dolly Parton or Garbage on tour and fit in seamlessly. Kiss, the ever-popular Prince classic gets the DM treatment next, countrified but still funky, followed by the chord-descending Wilderness, a full-on rocker with 70’s claws. Nobody’s Child is from a different era, both their own and generally, a hippified Big Brother and the Holding Company, Janis harmonising with herself.
Every Thursday night on every estate there is a pub holding a Karaoke night. That night is the ringing bell of freedom for some. It is a couple of hours where the dissatisfied and the dissolute can join in the holy bond, singers of a certain song. The criteria are unknown, but a song rarely leaves (I Will Survive, Black Velvet) and may be fairly recent(Shake It Off, Back To Black, Rehab) and is nearly always sung by women, Bat Out Of Hell being the honourable exception. Dea Matrona write to achieve this level of public knowledge, every song known by whoever delivers your milk, whoever delivers your parcels.
The brilliance of their mid-set, So Damn Dangerous, Black Rain and their cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Oh Well, is they achieve that perfect mix of Rock, Blues and Modern Pop and lose no integrity in the process. Vocals and guitars are shared more or less equally, chatting with the crowd like long-lost family. Glory Glory (I Am Free) is sung by almost everyone after a talk about some homemade sparkly hats, and Dead Man’s Heart makes you want to square dance if you could only find the space.
The slinky acoustic funk of Every Night I Want You is a lovely thing, a pause from the diabolical heat, sweat dripping from the high ceiling, you trust the neighbours won’t have to pay much of the heating bill. Followed by a raucous blast through the current cultural colossus that is Sophie Ellis Bextors Murder On The Dancefloor, probably about to enter that Karaoke list itself, with a phenomenal bass line that made the cubicles shake.
Red Button is Stevie Nicks meets Carrie Underwood, a beautiful crossover that should be destroying Radio masts from here to Texas. The universe that this band are superstars in needs to pay a visit here, the quality of the songwriting needs to be heard by so many more. The unexpected encore is an earlier single Make You My Star, an old school Glam track modelled on the genius of The Runaways.
Phil Lynott was a poet and a cowboy soul fronting a rock band, and this is what we return to with Dea Matrona. Two brilliant writers, poets with cowboy souls, entirely bewitched.
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Dea Matrona’s Facebook | Instagram | Website
All words by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram
Photos by Jack Flynn. You can find more from him on hisauthor’s archive, and @jackflynnphoto onFacebook,Twitter, andInstagramas well as hisphotography website.
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