It’s not often I feel guilty about making an assessment of a set almost instantly after making it. The support act for the first full-band live show in the UK by NYC alt-pop sensation Jamie Krasner aka James K, was Ryley Walker. Singer/guitarist Walker is well established in US alternative circles to say the least – he’s made a dozen-odd albums, and collaborated with everyone from experimental/improv mainstays (Bill McKay, David Grubbs) to straight-up musical royalty (he toured as a duo with the former Pentangle bassist Danny Thompson). We’d kind of expected, given that the headliner’s electronica-shoegaze-pop songs as released are clean, shiny and tuneful, that he might lean into the less skronky side of his oeuvre.
He did not. He sat at a table in front of a MacBook, generated some churning ambient sound with it featuring electrical crackles that sounded like equipment short-circuiting, then started letting loose over it with lengthy, sludgy psychedelic guitar solos before singing a bit. That, interspersed with archly nerdy between-song chat eliciting polite chuckles from the slowly filling auditorium – including one admittedly hilarious riff on being excited to be in London as it’s the home of oaf-punks Sham 69 – was pretty much it. Sometimes it sounded like Dinosaur Jr jamming while the muffled sound of a hippie rave came through the wall, sometimes it sounded like Tracy Chapman down a k-hole.
All of which sounds like good weird fun in theory, but it really hadn’t been optimised for the cavernous Barbican Hall and those glitchy crackles in particular leapt out of the PA sounding completely separate to the rest of his sound and setting us all on edge. The most charitable thing I could think was, “I guess this would be a lot more fun in a little Brooklyn club,” but it really wasn’t getting anyone in the mood for Friday night fun times in that big auditorium. I did start to worry how well prepared for the space James K was going to be, too, given that the only other things on the stage were a bass, a couple of guitars and another tiny table with another MacBook plugged into a couple of other unknown boxes – and when she came on, wearing layered clothes like some fashion version of a Nordic fairytale forest-dweller, flanked by two guys who looked like she’d dragged them out of their shifts at an electronic components store, there wasn’t much sign of stagecraft, either.
The lighting was pretty minimal, too, and it had a strong feel of likewise having been transplanted direct onto this large stage from a little DIY/indie club. But as Krasner fiddled with her computer and a weightless dancehall rhythm surrounded by the softest of synthetic chords came out it seemed to wash away all awkwardness and the minute she started singing the entire space felt filled. It also became clear that one of the other two guys on stage was Walker, and he was adding the most perfectly minimalist guitar embellishments which also spiralled up to the rafters with Krasner’s synths. With the trip hop relentlessness of “Doom Bikini”, Lazar Bozic’s basslines also came forward in the mix, and it was very obvious that this, musically, was anything but ramshackle.
The contrast between the sound and the setup – Krasner delivering diffident and awkward between-song chat, Walker and particularly Bozic when not playing boogieing to her songs as if they were just fans or friends who’d wandered up on stage – was discombobulating at first but got ever more delightful. The absolute locking in of completely egoless playing by the instrumentalists to Krasner’s electronic composition elevated and expanded the tracks, all providing a huge backdrop for the real magic which came each time Krasner sang. In each song, the shy and goofy tinkerer behind the computer would step away from her table, lift the mic, and appear to grow a couple of inches as she became an utterly commanding performer, gesturing, swaying, reaching out toward the audience, all perfectly amplifying her phrasing.
It’s not surprising Krasner’s work gets Cocteau Twins comparisons – the Cocteaus are one of those artists, like Sade, Aphex Twin and Arthur Russell whose influence only soaks through more deeply with every passing generation, and like any of her peers she openly aspires to their “cathedrals of sound” (as the old inky press cliché had it). And her voice certainly has enough of Liz Fraser’s power and purity to bear that comparison – though you might also find heavy hints of Enya and Sinead O’Connor in places too. Her composition and production are unabashedly ambitious and on the live stage, something about the awkwardness and not straining to be cool just made their sincerity feel all the greater. Looking around the sold out crowd, it was obviously plenty of people were feeling it too, whether beaming from their seats or – a couple of times – dancing en masse.
The set wasn’t that structured: those dancing moments died away, and we were back into levitational ambience, or the deliciously glacial and gloomy rock-out of “Life of a Fly” followed by a heartbreakingly strung out cover of Beck’s classic of regretfulness “Lost Cause”. It did all feel a bit like the kind of ad hoc show you’d see in a smaller venue at quite a few points, notably when the encore consisted of only Krasner and her computer playing a rather too drawn-out, dubwise “Scorpio”. But ultimately that was part of the joy. In an era of over-professionalisation, marketisation, algorithmisation of everything, the goofy joy of leftfield musicians thrown on to a big stage was part of what made the night – and in retrospect even walker’s noodling kind of, sort of made sense as a palette cleanser: but all of that only worked, ultimately, because of the stellar grace of Krasner’s voice, songs and performance which overwhelmed all else as they played.
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