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The mirrorball glittered over a sedate, seated Shepherd's Bush crowd as Kathryn Williams swung into an appropriately floaty number from third album Old Low Light.
Often lazily labelled a female Nick Drake due to her fondness for string-tinged melancholy, Williams is more akin to a folksy Madonna, with a creative brain as sharp as her voice is strong and sweet. Four albums into a defiantly self-determined career, her latest release is Relations, an album of intelligent, eclectic covers, a genre-hopping dance from Mae West's bawdy A Guy What Takes His Time to Pavement's barbed Spit on a Stranger.
Laid back but competent support had come courtesy of Clayhill, an amiable, double bass toting four piece. Their relaxed slightly jazzy sound was pleasant enough, though their frontman's zipped up, hands in his pockets stance was rather audience alienating.
The opposite is true of Williams who is always capable of forming a winning rapport with a crowd, even though she was noticeably less chatty than she has been in previous concerts: there were fewer endearingly rambling anecdotes, fewer dippy digressions; taking to the stage she launched straight into In a Broken Dream, one of the strongest tracks from Relations.
Backed by her usual band of cellist Laura Reid and guitarist David Scott, her set fortunately doesn't neglect her self-penned songs, and the high points from her Mercury prize nominated album Little Black Numbers are all warmly revisited. Soul to Feet and Tell the Truth as If It Were Lies are as elegantly bittersweet as ever, and the touching Fell Down Fast is a particular gem, the plaintive cello-plucked chorus drawn out, the sense of loss and regret tangible. Of the newer material Lou Reed's Candy Says and the aforementioned Spit on a Stranger are highpoints and she even includes one number from her "lesser-spotted first album" Dog Leap Stairs.
Though she occasionally utilises a silver "shaky egg" and at one point attacks her guitar strings with a cello bow, musically Williams and her band are not the most adventurous of groups, and though all her songs share a fragile beauty there is little stylistic variation to the way they approach much of their material. However this sense of repetitiveness is turned on its head at the end of the evening when she tackles Leonard Cohen's oft-covered Hallelujah.
Attempting a song that is still most closely associated with Jeff Buckley and the tune of choice for a host of over-ambitious buskers, Williams draws a refreshing tenderness from Cohen's lyrics and her clear, gentle voice builds to an amazingly raw roar that manages to send shivers through the entire audience. She leaves us exactly as she wants us, warm, elated and aching for her return to songwriting.
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