Gig review: KT Tunstall, Glasgow

You know you can expect an intimate listening experience when the venue bar shuts just before the main event.

Singer KT Tunstall. Picture: Getty

KT Tunstall - Oran Mor, Glasgow

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KT Tunstall, as always, demands to be heard; it’s just that this time, armed with a new album Invisible Empire//Crescent Moon, she is conversing in quieter tones, eschewing the bold pop songs of her earlier albums for mellow country-tinged fare.

It has been a pensive year for the Fife musician. Last summer, in the course of one month, her father died and her marriage broke up. These events have had a bearing on her new songs. So here she stood, petite but powerful, and shared, in the most bittersweet and sometimes comically irreverent of terms, her most personal work to date.

It has become a cliche to talk about artists maturing, but Tunstall has certainly progressed in creating the warm plangent sound of Waiting On The Heart, the resonating Carried, gossamer Chimes, Joni Mitchellesque soaring purity of Alchemy and, best of all, the languorous, sensual revelation of current single Feel It All.

Next to these numbers, her early single Other Side Of The World sounded almost heavy-handed, though the crowd seized on its familiarity. And it transpired that the rhythmic blues of Black Horse and the Cherry Tree can still turn a room of adults into whooping fools.

Elsewhere, Don Henley’s Boys Of Summer responded well to the Tunstall loop pedal treatment and there was a mixed bag of piano ballads, with Crescent Moon emerging as a highlight of an assured and absorbing set.