Adelaide-based singer-songwriter Jen Lush has had success both as part of folk band Cat Dog Bird and as a solo artist. Since her first solitary-outing in 2017, the artist has appeared at festivals and venues throughout Australia, making a name for herself as intimate and adventurous in her sound.
Lush’s 2021 album ‘Let Loose The Beating Birds’, reached #11 on Three D’s top 100+1 for 2021 and won her the ARBA Roots Album of the Year.
Her latest project, new album ‘Hum of the Mettle’, is rooted in Australian poetry, commissioned for the Denmark Festival of Voice (WA). Jen takes the poetry, and through her glorious and evocative performances, makes the words her own. Enticing vocal tones create a lush storytelling space with vibrant melodies dotted throughout. Instrumentally, acoustic guitars outline chords while electric guitars add texture and thickness to counter melodies. Drums are reserved but emotional in their movement and beautiful keys parts lace each idyllic soundscape.
Jen explains, “This record came out of a commissioned project to create new songs around contemporary Australian poetry. It features the words of five of Australia’s leading published poets and crosses through the urban and desert terrain of South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia with poems that speak of love and desolation, loss and memory, the resilience of the country and the stories held within it.
I want to share the poetry that roared, bled, whispered and sang into my skin and caused me to sing it back. As a collection they form a dynamic range from epic 70’s rock soundscapes, sudden storms of explosive pop, driving indie folk-rock and whispering, sparse ballads that build to cathartic crescendos. The band blends vocals stark and spacious over sonorous acoustic and electric guitars, keys, bass, drums and percussion, with storytelling always at the centre.”
