Live Review: Julien Baker, Adam Torres

Time stood still on Wednesday night, as Julien Baker and Adam Torres entranced their admiring Hobart audience with weeping guitar sections and elegant delivery.

The most immersive of artists will have the audience playing with them, rising up through the climax of the song and nodding, absorbed, through its descent. This was a power that both have mastered. They are, both, arresting vocalists and simply unmissable.

The tour support, hailing all the way from Austin, Texas, was a genuine shock to the dense crowd, with a glowing falsetto that turned every head. Indeed, the understated Adam Torres' brand of rolling guitar picks and lofty howls was the perfect counterpart to the headline. Over a decade since the release of Nostra Nova, Torres played the guitar so gently, it was as if he feared it might break. His vocals carried a similar tenderness, wavering and heavenly, before receding softly. The audience, captivated, would lift ever so slightly with Torres' wails, and sway slowly when he retreated from the mic, to focus on gentle strumming and intricate fingerpicking.

Classic rock enthusiasts in the audience cheered at Torres' stirring cover of Big Star's Thirteen, which illustrated the history and grandeur the singer-songwriter taps into. The lyrics of the Southerner simmered with pain and vulnerability throughout the set, revealing the heart of Torres' songs, a piercing yearning and melancholy. Finally, the crowd was left breathless and serene at the stunning register Torres reached in his last song, Green Mountain Road, the highlight of his EP I Came To Sing The Song.

The dreamlike atmosphere continued as Julien Baker took the stage, to a warm ovation. Immediately, the crowd was wrapped in the spin of guitar strings and the honey-like lilt of the Tennessee artist. Each cinematic vocal section was like a whisper, that you lean in to hear, curious about what will be said. Between songs, loud applause would ring out and then complete silence would fall again. The softly spoken singer-songwriter told the crowd "you guys are so quiet", and as Everybody Does came to a close, only a single "wooo" came from the eerie silence. It could only be described as an intimate and sacred space for her voice that no one wanted to interrupt.

As raw as acoustic music gets, each song was an incredibly soothing and cathartic act of love, and audience members stood like statues from front to back to drink it in. Baker perched on resonant high notes before plunging into resigned breaths in Blacktop. Sprained Ankle looped hypnotic guitar sections over crushing lyrics: "Wish I could write songs about anything other than death". Wounded and bare on stage, it felt truly like it was just you and her. Baker explained her meaning, to "reassign positive meaning to some painful things", and that aching sentiment made the brief moments of aggression throughout the set feel even more real.

The most affecting art gives you an insight into the creator and stays with you long after the fact, and I have rarely experienced that experience so purely. If you can see Baker and Torres on tour, don't hesitate.