l u c i e t h o r n e
press
recent press:
Thorne writes some of the most simple and beautiful folk songs you will hear. Where Night Birds Call is filled with stunning sketches of love and loss and small town life.
The Age, EG
Thorne creates an oasis of musical beauty which is completely entrancing ... deceptively simple ... disarmingly sweet ... stunningly beautiful
The Canberra Times
Thorne is one member of the elite club of local singer/songwriters - think Holly Throsby, Clare Bowditch - creating sublime folk/pop.
The Good Weekend
Thorne's smoked voice has a languidness and an urgency; ... a pop-folk gentleness but a rock tension. Her voice matches the way the songs simmer before bubbling up into something intense. Those mini explosions may be unexpected, but the strength of her songwriting is in creating a space where you are drawn in and carried on whatever winds prevail.
Live review from The Basement 15/04/08; Bernard Zuel, Sydney Morning Herald
The songs on Where Night Birds Call are close enough to touch. Thorne's near-whispered, lovelorn vignettes are startlingly and infinitely believable; spare and skeletal in terms of ideas and arrangements but beautifully lush and textured in their rendering of thematic, tonal and melodic detail. Weary, lovelorn ballads (The Upfield Line, Home Sized Town, Night Drive) are pitched against strikingly pared-back rock (The Movies, Five Years and the sublime self-sung harmonies of Shot in the Dark) with a rare, natural ease.
****, The Age
The guitar tapestry woven by Thorne and Heath Cullen acoustics and muted electrics is a lesson in musical empathy. Where Night Birds Call is every bit as entrancing as its criminally ignored predecessor, The Bud.
The Canberra Times
One of Australia's finest soulful songwriters
Beat Magazine
...Lyrically, Thorne is unabashed in writing about carefully-observed and faithfully documented, or imagined, small-town subjects. This makes for captivating, charming, intensely humane, fragile songs, performed with sublime sensitivity by, especially, her collaborator, lead guitarist and backing vocalist, Heath Cullen but, no less, her bassist (and well-matched backing vocalist), Robyn Martin and empathic drummer, Jay McMahon. For those of us who’ve only just discovered this polished gem has been recording for a good ten years, the poverty of our ignorance is almost too much to bear. Thorne well understands the power, romance and magic that lies in what is simple, everyday and even mundane. That which is right under our nose, but which we can so rarely see, obscured, as it so often is, by the migraine-inducing glare of vacuous celebrity. Lucie, her songs & presentation are a tonic.
excerpt from Australian Stage live review, 19/04/08
media release for lucie's Darebin Music Feast concerts in Melbourne, September 2008.
media release for lucie's Tasmanian Spring Tour with Kate Fagan, September 2008.