Eliza Niemi with Izzy True, Pleasure Dome, Wax Girl
Nikki Lopez
304 South St.
Philadelphia
Dec. 4, 2025
Eliza Niemi, the Toronto-based singer, songwriter, producer and composer, is one of my absolute favorite artists going these days because she’s just totally committed, totally engaged. Nothing is phoned in: every word and note is considered. (Talk about committing to the bit: who else do you know that has a Bandcamp Friday tattoo?) Niemi makes sumptuous records, filled to the brim with details, by which I mean: each song has its own musical and sonic ingredients and language and texture; and just as crucially, she writes lyrics with the same attention and observational eye, filling her songs with super-specific language.
“Why’d they move the rock to the other side of Ulster Park?” she sang in “Do U FM,” which opened her set like it opens her latest album, this year’s Progress Bakery. This isn’t a vague question that could apply to anyone anywhere, it’s about a particular thing in a particular place; I don’t know if I’ve been to the same park she’s singing about, but I’ve noticed similar things about places that meant something to me, been similarly bothered by small shifts. The song later wryly quotes someone named Kenny (of fellow Canadian band Little Kid) saying that they hate when proper names show up in song lyrics because it “makes them not universal.” Niemi’s songs deliberately challenge that thought, eschewing generalities in favor of grounding, concrete elements, and, to me, they succeed largely because the precision of their images is matched equally by her utterly unique tone and voice. Niemi leans into her distinct qualities like a legendary character actor, like she sees playing herself as the role of a lifetime. Whether wringing pathos from ruminations on death and loss or noticing the color of the shirt is “Tampax-pearl-blue (iridiscent),” you trust her songs because they feel real, something a person really felt and saw and heard and smelled. “I smell the beauty in the garbage, amen,” she sang in “DM BF,” “I think it smells kinda sweet, like a garden.”
Niemi and her band – Kyla Marena on cello, Jo Passed on electric guitar and keys, Liam Cole on drums, all three singing – sounded excellent throughout, but the songs were most fragrant (or pungent, or stinky) when you could make out the words. (It bears mentioning that the entire show was marred somewhat by quiet vocals, infrequently loud or clear enough in the mains to be legible over full-bore drumming; I couldn’t hear Wax Girl’s singer at all, couldn’t make out a melody to save my life. I’ve had this problem at Nikki Lopez before. Hopeful they can figure it out on a more consistent basis.) Cole played most of the first half of the set with brushes, and those songs struck a great balance mix-wise where you could hear everything — every cello bow scrape, every pizzicato pluck, every millisecond of reverb trail — and still take in the pleasure of Niemi’s typically thoughtful, often hilarious, always idiosyncratic lyrics. There was a very brief song the quartet sang acapella, met with an abundance of cheers and grinning: “The local grocery store reminds me of you / The little bugs on my floor remind me of you / That little fart sound my chair makes when I sit down to do takes reminds me of you / The fact that I can’t stop thinking of you / No matter what I do / That reminds me of you, tooooooooo …” (That last note they held out, long and high, until the breath ran out.) “It all reminds me of you.” What could be more universal than bringing to light the existence of an infinite longing within the tiniest fart sound?
