Sydney musician Le Pie dazzled Fitzroy’s Worker’s Club with her dark dreamy pop songs and honest charisma. On the road to promote the release of her sophomore EP Sad Girl Theory, the 3-date tour’s stopover in Melbourne featured supports by the forever amazing Dianas and Poppongene. Le Pie and her gang of super talented Sydney musicians took to the stage on a somewhat quiet Melbourne night. At first glance, Le Pie is a demure figure up on stage behind her dusty pink electric guitar. Floating into the first lulling lines of the EP’s opener I Just Wanna Sing About Boys, the whole room is immediately filled with Le Pie’s starring saccharine vocals. Once the band begins their slow ascent, with drummer Courtney Luzmila singing the sweet backing vocals, the audience transcends into Le Pie’s swayful 60s aesthetic, punk demeanour and emotive story telling.
Sad Girl Theory takes its title after Audrey Woollen’s conceptual work that positions female sadness as a form of resistance, to dismantle the oppressive expectations of pursuing perceived happiness and approval. For Le Pie, where the 6-track EP posits this resistance through the exploration of heartache and abandonment, her stage presence also stood proudly as a representation of the EP’s namesake. If she hadn’t said so, nobody would tell that she was battling an inhibiting sore throat and that the 4-piece band were frazzled from frustrating day-long flight delays. Instead, Le Pie aka Sarah Fenn owned it, chewing on spoonfuls of honey between songs and retelling the plight about almost not making it down to Melbourne.
For the show at The Worker’s Club, Le Pie played through an irresistible set of her new Sad Girl Theory release that included singles Go Unsteady and White Walls and Promises. She also treated the crowd to tracks from her 2015 EP And He Said Honey, You Look So Fine, gave a glimpse at newly written songs and the band also played a cool cover of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit. A personal favourite for the night was Animal Friends, a slow jam that puts a spotlight on Le Pie’s melancholic songwriting, sugar coated with reverb drenched guitars and a steady ballad beat. After the show, a quick chat to Sarah resulted in phones being pulled out to swap doggo photos of our respective staffies, which made the cherry on top of a very magical evening of music.
If you missed out on the show, you can listen to Le Pie’s shiny new EP Sad Girl Theory on Spotify or Bandcamp.