Hello Saferide
Live @ Filter's Culture Collide Festival 10/09/10
Last weekend, Filter Magazine staged the Culture Collide Festival -- a veritable United Nations of indierock, and (if my opinion as one of their freelance writers is to be trusted) a freaking genius idea. Among the weekend's standout international sets (Might I suggest KAMP! and Casiokids for all your dance party needs?) was Hello Saferide (Annika Norlin to her friends) who, with Andrea Kellerman of Firefox AK, made her Los Angeles debut with three intimate shows.
While the size of the venue -- really the backroom of French restaurant Taix -- made it a bid difficult to call her Saturday night performance a case of taking the city by storm, those present were treated to an all-too-brief intimate performance an incredibly skilled storyteller. (Heck, she didn't name her sophomore album, "More modern stories from Hello Saferide" for nothing.) Replacing the album's electric guitars for an acoustic axe and a kick drum, Norlin breathed new life into the material -- most notably during "Anna", and the onomonopia-dense "Arjeplog" where the stripped-down version elevated Norlin's art of the broken heart.
From apologizing to an über fan parked in the front row for playing the same set three days in a row (he didn't seem to mind), to telling the audience about her wacky Los Angeles pen pal ("She slept with all these hockey players and then wrote to me about it. I was thirteen!") Norlin came across as an every-woman worth knowing. Here's hopping Los Angeles was listening.
- Laura Studarus
