Review: Irya's Playground

Arts Festival

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THE BOYS FROM VENEZUELA: Los Amigos Invisibles, from left, Juan M Roura, Julio Briceno, Maurigo Arcas, Armando Figueredo, and Jose R Torres.

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Irya's Playground
Pacific Blue Festival Club, Sunday

Irya's Playground is a Swedish indie-pop group, formed around the vocals and songwriting of Irya Gmeyner. The group has been performing the onstage musical accompaniment to Cirkus Cirkor's Inside Out.

In their own show, there are moments of joy and intrigue as a slight twang of countryish guitar merges with a 1960s organ sound, but many of the songs are like the sort of pop tunes that Mike Oldfield was trying to write in the 1980s. And, apart from Moonlight Shadow, that was a giant failure for Oldfield.

Gmeyner is clearly the star of this show - the band plays an instrumental piece before she takes the stage, essentially giving her a buildup. But really the star of the band is drummer Erik Nilsson who uses the bell of the cymbal, the butt of the stick, the rim of the drums, clicking and clacking and providing punctuation to many of the songs rather than driving a groove.

Keyboardist, Ludvig Rylander, is also solid - he and Nilsson hold the sound together and give it structure.

Unfortunately too many of the songs suffer from hackneyed lyrics, a one-note performance setting from Gmeyner and the feeling that this modern indie-pop is incredibly dated without attempting to appeal to or reference any retro ideas.

People who saw the theatre show were possibly thrilled to see Irya's Playground working in a new setting and another side to the band.

But as a rock show by a rock band this was nothing special - the sort of thing that if performed as a standalone show, outside of the Arts Festival umbrella, would have attracted no interest at all. And though the band is not without its charms, it's telling that the closing cover of The Church's Under The Milky Way was one of the best songs - by a long way.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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