Music review: St Vincent, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

The new stage show by St Vincent, aka Texan sonic auteur Annie Clark, in promotion of last year’s sixth solo album Daddy’s Home is the most striking and original rock performance since her old collaborator David Byrne’s American Utopia.

Amid sleek ‘70s rock, with Clark and her trio of backing singers dressed in smart Studio 54 styles, the synthetic recorded gloss was stripped off signature songs including Digital Witness and Birth in Reverse, their jagged, urbane riffs calling to mind Young Americans-era Bowie. “I like the hell outta you guys,” she announced to the crowd, as her dancer/assistant Arianna Henry, dressed like a diner waitress from American Graffiti, served her a glass of water on a tray.

Clark took the show to interesting places with her onstage manner, subverting that old notion of the in-charge male singer (Rod Stewart or Bryan Ferry, perhaps) surrounded by a supporting cast of female performers. She’s the boss but also the equal of those around her: the interactions with Henry were sexy, but not sexual, and then she mingled casually with her singers on …At the Holiday Party.

There were archetypal rock moments: Clark standing on the crowd’s shoulders for New York, crooning to “the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me”, then indulging in a face-off with fellow guitarist Jason Falkner on the racing Sugarboy. And there were political statements, too. “This one goes out to the Supreme Court of the United States,” she pronounced, before the state-of-the-nation Cheerleader. “May they suffer greatly.”

The show was pure theatre, the set a sublime piece of low-budget design, with a bespoke fabric city skyline backdrop and a few strips of lighting gels under the risers making the stage resemble an expensive nightclub. The staging and choreography hit its crescendo with the encore; the stage was washed blood-red for the taut, angered Your Lips Are Red, and the evening culminated in a mighty spectacle when her singers moved in a slow-motion spacewalk around her during the blissful Live in the Dream. A live masterpiece.