Cape music picks: August 19 2011

‘I guess you could write a good song if your heart hadn’t been broken, but I don’t know of anyone whose heart hasn’t been broken,” said American songstress Lucinda Williams when asked why she wrote such sad songs.

Laurie Levine knows what she means.

Her penchant for crafting ballads about desire lost and love’s paradise postponed earned her a reputation as one of South Africa’s most confessional femme-folk sirens on South African Music Award-nominated albums Unspoken (2007) and Living Room (2009). ‘The process is mysterious and hard to grasp, but you have to let the song speak its truth,” she says about her latest collection of new songs, Six Winters. Expect an unflinchingly intimate journey that maps love’s many highs and lows.

Gatta Patat, Cape Diamond Hotel, corner of Parliament and Long streets. August 19. Entrance is R50. Tel 021 461 2519.

‘God really doesn’t want to take away all your fun! But if you’re not careful you’ll end with none!” cautions lead singer Pamela de Menezes on the hip-shaking ditty One for the Brothers. It is a playfully kitsch pop climax to the Durban-based indie chick duo’s debut set of songs of faith and devotion, Make Believe. Relax, The Arrows are not fundamentalist Christian ­conversion therapists. Sidestepping the temptation to preach to their audiences, the upwardly mobile pop pair simply inventory such ­everyday issues as free will, Afro-­pessimism, painting the town red and the paranoia of having to be ‘impossibly cool”. This contagiously cute cocktail of soul-baring chamber pop, indie cabaret and joyous acid jazz is primed to get fans of Dear Reader and Tori Amos to take a leap of faith.

Zula Bar, 88 Long Street, Cape Town. August >20 at 9pm. Entrance is R65 presold or R70 at the door.