Music
Julia Holter
The Hug and Pint, Glasgow
Jamie Chambers
Four stars
In a perfect world Julia Holter would be playing the Royal Concert Hall amidst all the hallowed trappings of bourgeois concert-going: symphony orchestra, female choir, and harpsichord flown in specially. In the real world, sadly, such filigree and spectacle tend to be trundled out for blander fare, rather than the rare birds like Holter whose singular voice truly merits such a fuss.
Its frustrating then to see one of 2015’s most essential artists cooped up in the tight squeeze of a sold-out Hug and Pint which – crammed to the gunwales with Glasgow’s artiest and beardiest – is all hug and no pint. Nevertheless Holter wears it well, and her 4-piece (viola, double bass, drums and Holter herself) have character to spare. The sheer spectrum of colour they’re able to conjure together is exhilarating, and the chamber dynamics of Green Wild, Marienbad and Vasquez in particular are lucid, sumptuous and remarkable (even if the more orchestral ambition of songs like Horns Surrounding Me proves a little harder to reach beneath the Hug’s low ceilings).
Given her immaculate, even arch, aestheticism on record, the biggest surprise is how funny Holter is, buoying the set with charmingly silly, hyper-literate musings about a "Deleuzian guitar" amongst other things. Despite cramped quarters (and the fact most of us can barely see the band) I’m left marvelling again at the sheer singularity and character of Holter’s music which, glimpsed in the real world, loses none of its mystery. It's at once generous and enigmatic, giving and yet elusive. Holter’s impeccable studio craftsmanship hints at solipsistic illusion – does she actually exist? She does, it turns out, and in the very real world of the Hug and Pint, she’s sublime.
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