Gig review: Jenny O, Nice N Sleazy, Glasgow

By DAVE POLLOCK
Published on 04/08/2012 00:04

Despite a Twitter page which boldly describes her as a “rock’n’roll musician”, understatement seems to be key to the style of lone guitarswoman Jenny O – certainly in terms of the rest of her online presence, which tells us nothing about her other than the extent of her limited recording career and the fact she’s based in California.

Even her surname remains a mystery.

In which case her live set is a slow-burning education, an unhurried introduction to an artist whose music doesn’t grab the attention but rather slowly charms its way into the heart. It doesn’t help that her audience for this basement gig was a thin seated scattering of hipsters and alternative country fans who were modest with their applause, but the laid-back young brunette in flower-printed blue flares and a cropped check blouse seemed stoic in the face of having to work hard. Besides, as her deliberately off-key croon had it during one track: “I ain’t gonna be a cheerleader / I can’t do tricks and I ain’t that sick.”

Although the arrangements were stripped back like whittled wood, just her tenderly strummed acoustic or some lazily picked, reverb-heavy guitar, her twanging country croon was a thing of diverse emotive beauty: by turns tenderly romantic, strikingly sexual as she gulped down the lyric “where’s the good love, honey?” and giving the impression of a fierce secret withheld amidst the telling words “you would never call 
me baby / if you knew me, chum.”

Rating: ***