Live: Rainy Milo

24th October 2013

Gorilla

3/10

Rainy Milo is an up and coming singer from London, another BRIT School attendee, and purports to perform jazz inspired songs. Her 30 minute set at Gorilla saw her perform with only a drum kit for live company, which gave the onstage performance a good sense of intimacy and being relaxed.

However, Milo’s material is too homogeneous to maintain any possibility of sustained interest to anyone but her hardcore fans who know every song that she’s written. The majority of the songs in her set had a very similar tempo, style and drum beat within them, making it very difficult to discern one song from another. Milo’s vocal delivery was also far from clear, and the overbearing level of the drums in the mix only made it harder to pick out any sort of vocal line beyond the presence of vowels. The absence of any  real harmonic, melodic or motivic interest in the backing track only served to exemplify the tediousness of the songs.

In addition to these points, Milo’s overly sexualised stage behaviour also brought into question what she thought the crowd was there to see. While part of the act of performance is being in the moment of the song, Milo thrusted her way through every song in the set, constantly gyrating her hips as if the lights would have been switched off if she had stopped.

When taken in isolation, many of the songs that Rainy Milo performed would have been passable and almost enjoyable. However when they are following one after another for half an hour, any individual nuances that the songs may have are lost amid the poorly balanced mix and lack of any stark contrasts to wake the listener up.