Gig review: Lauren Pritchard

LAUREN PRITCHARD ***CABARET VOLTAIRE, EDINBURGH

DESPITE the paying public's demand for everything to be just so, you have to take the rough with the smooth when things aren't exactly as you want them.

It's a special treat for all when bands are flying so high they feel ready to improvise or break from the script at a show; but that doesn't mean it's an artist's fault if, as here, she feels so hamstrung by the sheer underwhelming intimacy of playing to barely 20 people that her set feels straitened, as if it's just clawing its way through the motions.

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Not that Lauren Pritchard, a Tennessee girl based in London, by way of Beverly Hills and New York, got a particularly raw deal here.

Everyone in attendance listened intently and made sure a round of appreciative applause was heard after every song. For Pritchard, though, it must have seemed like each throwaway comment she made was falling on the empty floor in front of her and breathing its last for everyone to see.

When the blessed relief of each new song came, though, it was easy to believe that she deserves bigger audiences. Her voice had a folky twang on tracks like Wasted in Jackson, No Way and Stuck, but the music possessed a glossy, soulful edge, even played in this stripped-back arrangement of Pritchard on keyboard alongside a guitarist and a drummer playing a wooden box with brushes.

It was like Carole King fronting the Style Council; or Carly Simon, to shorten the comparison.

When the Night Kills the Day is her centrepiece song, the recorded version having been co-written by Ed Harcourt and produced by Mumford & Sons, and it stood out alongside the oddly chirpy melancholy of set closer Not the Drinking.

When even the guy in charge of the PA thought the set was over at a little over half an hour, though, and the artist had to edge back onstage for an encore, it was hard not to share her sigh of relief as that final song rang to a close.

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