GIG REVIEW: She's in the Trees, Music in a Foreign Language and Dominoes at The Egg Cafe - Saturday 25 January 2025

Words: Richie Yates, photos: Adrian Wharton, Alan Blundell and Richie Yates

Its been a while since I last saw live music at Liverpool’s Egg Cafe, so long I’d forgotten how mellow and relaxed a venue it could be. Folk sitting at benches, eating food whilst the bands were on, all very chilled and pleasant.

I arrive half way through Liverpool music scene alumni Dominic Lewington in his Dominoes guise singing accompanied by backing tracks. An unusual turn as I’d expected him to be strumming and plucking an acoustic. It did however allow him to have a wider range of sounds backing him. Dominic told me after the gig that it would have been a wider range but some technical issues had prevented half of the stereo mix of instruments from being audible. The tech problems however didn’t distract from an upbeat set of melodic niceness with Dom’s fragile come strong voice adding some complexity to it all.

Music in a Foreign Language delivered a set of ‘classics’. We know this as one half of the duo bantered that all their songs were classics. Acoustic jazzy guitar accompanying one or sometimes two voices, flawless delivery and perfectly suited to the ambience of the venue. We were informed that the band is normally larger than a two piece and that other musicians were in the audience and perhaps a shame we never saw the full lineup.

She’s in the Trees performed as a duo tonight. Amy’s large voice backed by Jules fantastic guitar work and occasionally adding her own acoustic strumming. There’s a mix of covers and original material, all of it dominated by that excellent voice and creative guitar. They wring emotion out of their subjects, love and loss frequently referenced and its an ideal framework for the duo to explore their own melodies and give cleaner more direct versions of their songs a run. Haunting vocal melodies with ethereal guitar lines that seem to have dropped in from some obscure film soundtrack. They end on an encore and plenty of cheering later its been a rather happy evening at Egg.