Nina Persson at the Button Factory – Review

Nina Persson at the Button Factory – March 6th

The Button Factory, one of the country’s finest music venues, situated in Temple Bar in the heart of Dublin played host to the wonderful Nina Persson on Thursday night. It was the last night of her current European tour promoting her latest and debut solo album ‘Animal Heart’.

Persson has worked with many big names over the years including Tom Jones and the Manic Street Preachers but of course she’s more well known for fronting the indie pop 5 piece The Cardigan’s who had massive success in the past with hits like ‘Love Fool’, ‘My Favourite Game’ and ‘Erase/Rewind’. On Thursday night though it was all about Nina and her ‘Animal Heart’.

Helped of course by the decent weather, she managed to attract quite a decent crowd too. There were some hardened fans there to pay witness to Nina strutting her stuff and I’d imagine they were not disappointed. Although the gig wasn’t anything groundbreaking she really did take it all in her stride and make her alt-pop look easy up there on stage.

She gave a solid performance throughout the set, kicking off with brand new tracks ‘Clip Your Wings’ and the excellently titled ‘Burning Bridges For Fuel’. There were also a few tracks thrown into the mix from her other band A Camp. Songs like ‘Frequent Flyer’ and ‘Bear on the Beach’ went down well with the attentive Irish crowd. The last song of the night, and incidentally the last song on the album, ‘This is Heavy Metal’ was actually anything but… it was a gem of track featuring a simple beautiful keyboard behind Nina’s gentle, haunting vocal. Well worth the ticket price alone.

All in all it was a great night of entertainment. The songs themselves weren’t anything special, just nice, well played synth pop.

Review by Leon Byrne