"I am Eliza Niemi," Eliza Niemi introduced herself to a quiet house last night at the Baby G. "The band is also called Eliza Niemi, 'cause I'm an ego freak maniac."
After a weekend of noise rock legends, arty experiments, punk raves and edgy goth summits, Niemi's headlining set at the Baby G was an outlier on Project Nowhere's schedule that felt more like a comforting local addendum than a festival showcase, grounding the fest in a sense of routine and place.
Niemi carried the casual tone, working out a set of mostly new songs with accompanying cellist/vocalist Kyla Marlena and Avalon Tassonyi (alternating between guitar and drums), the understated sense of humour that drives them amplified in the live setting.
Without reading the title they arrived under, the joke-y levity that drives Niemi's songs live didn't necessarily jump out at listeners on her 2022 debut Staying Mellow Blows (one of our underrated favourites of 2022). Like Mike Kinsella's Owen project or Ohbijou, at first blush, the songs on Niemi's album seem to wrap around themselves securely like a warm blanket, but at the Baby G, the winking knowingness that colours it all was unmistakable.
So when a voice in the crowd piped in a friendly heckle after the pair of tandem cello songs that opened the night by shouting "Alright let's start this fucking pit!" Niemi was all game. Responding from behind her cello with a coolly measured "Yes, this is the one," it landed with a sureness that was at once disarming as it was without tension.
Full of shout outs and song dedications to friends in the audience, Niemi worked patiently through the set, unpacking the subject matter the new songs were grounded in (pocky sticks, the green electrical boxes that connect our houses to the grid, a rock in Toronto's Ulster Park), encouraging open dialogue between audience and stage and never missing an opportunity to play into a bit.
When Tassonyi jokingly acknowledged Niemi and Marlena were both wearing white and asked if they were supposed to do the same, Niemi responded by improvising a tune on the spot, singing back softly over a quivering cello: "You were supposed to wear white, why don't you check your email?"
After rounding out the new tunes with Staying Mellow Blows selections "Walking Feels Slow" and a "club remix" of "Don't Think" dedicated to Westelaken's Jordan Seccareccia — who would eventually join the band to play a shaker on new track "Pocky" — Niemi borrowed Tassonyi's guitar and performed a solo rendition of her former band Mauno's "Burn This." She declared it her first time playing guitar in 12 years, dedicating the track to a friend visiting from BC.
You don't get that in a big room.