Show Review: House Concert with Brooke Annibale
Pittsburgh is holding out on us, Boston. Singer/songwriter Brooke Annibale hails from the steel city where she’s been honing a lush indie-pop sound that warrants comparisons to Norah Jones and Ingrid Michaelson. Annibale cut her teeth writing and performing in Nashville where she recorded her first disc, 2011’s Silence Worth Breaking, her 2013 EP, Words In Your Eyes, and 2015’s The Simple Fear before returning home to Pittsburgh.
I’ve had Annibale on my radar since Simple Fear dropped. It’s an album that sounds both fresh and familiar with deceptively light melodies—earworms of the best variety. It would be more than a year before I’d get to see her perform live. It was worth the wait.
I caught Annibale on her short tour through New England at a house concert in Boston. Some performers don’t know what to do with themselves in these types of spaces—they talk too much or not enough, they seem slightly anxious to be in such close proximity with the audience, they don’t know how walk that fine line of accessibility and awkwardness. Annibale treated the intimacy of the loft space with the same deft and ease that she might have in a large theater, letting her smoky vocals stretch and showcasing a technical control over the music that most performers hit a decade or more into their careers.
Touring in support of Simple Fear, Annibale played down a lot of the album as well as a few cherry-picked from her earlier work and something new she wanted to test drive to the small crowd. The strengths of her songwriting shine on tunes that feel like they’ve always been in your digital library, ones that seem to fit your mood before you even know what you need to hear. “Find My Way” is an easy-flowing love song that begs to have a home on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy or This Is Us. The soulful, longing waltz of “Patience” settled over the room in some kind of collective inhale as Annibale’s limber, elegant guitar picking seemed to cradle each verse. “Remind Me” bears traces of the trippy, lilting style of Zero Seven. The bare-bones rendition of this tune live is just as musically satisfying without any additional instrumentation. And I think that’s where Annibale branches off from other female solo artists. What she does on stage with little more than a mic, an amp, and capo sounds like it could be pouring out of a Nashville studio. It’s rare to hear a sound delivered so cleanly without sacrificing the emotion of a live show.
I can only hope that we see more of this talented artist in more varied venues around these parts. Pittsburgh, consider yourself on notice.
About Sheila
Sheila is a Boston-based writer and music junky. Her work has appeared on The Huffington Post, bioStories, Feminine Collective, and Niche Literary Journal. She is represented by Full Circle Literary Agency.
