Hailing from our very own Central Coast, Nick & Liesl specialise in acoustic pop songs that you’d expect to be playing in a café by the beach. Recorded at home by themselves, Friend and Lover is the third release from the duo, following an album, Feather, and their first EP, Wyong River.
The EP opens with the title track, ‘Friend and Lover’. Reminiscent of early Angus and Julia Stone, it’s a well crafted song with a cute little guitar repetition that will have you tapping along. It’s the kind of song you could imagine being coveted as the first dance song at weddings for hipsters. This is the definite standout track on the EP – Nick and Liesl’s voices dance in and around each other in perfect harmony.
The rest of the album is harder to judge, with two cover songs thrown in, including ‘Raphael’, a cover originally by Carla Bruni, famous for marrying French president Nicholas Sarkozy. The duo’s rendition adds a light and airy quality to the song, with Bruni’s original recording sounding more dark and foreboding. It’s a pretty song and showcases Liesl’s delicate voice, but it sits oddly amongst the rest of the songs.
The other cover, ‘Your Body is a Wonderland’, originally by John Mayer, is pretty, with the pair’s vocal harmonies sounding perfect and some nice little piano thrown in. But the cover lacks a wow factor that you need when a song is thrown on a record. Like ‘Raphael’, it sounds a bit disjointedly amongst the other songs on the EP.
Friend and Lover finally wraps up with an original, ‘Skipping Seasons’, with Liesl taking front and centre with the vocals. Her voice has a beautifully vulnerable quality on this song, but also a quiet strength. But like their other original, ‘Missing You’, it just seems to drift for a while and never hits a point where it goes to another level. There’s just something missing.
Friend and Lover is not a bad EP, but it’s not amazing either. It would have been nice to see more original songs that showcased the duo’s songwriting ability, which they obviously have. Two years since their LP Feathers, Friends and Lover is missing the slick production and songwriting of Feathers and sounds like a bit like it’s just filling a large gap between drinks.
6/10
Reviewer: Stephanie McDonald