Gig review: Carina Round, King Tut’s, Glasgow

ONE of the perennial truths of the music business is that, sadly, it doesn’t function on a straight sliding scale of talent-to-success.

Carina Round

King Tut’s, Glasgow

Star rating: * *

Carina Round well knows this: she’s released four solo albums in 11 years, collaborated with Ryan Adams and Brian Eno, and evidently has talent to burn – and yet substantial commercial returns remain elusive.

The glimpse of the Wolverhampton-born, California-based alt-rock singer-songwriter this show offered – before she and her three-piece band hastened proceedings to an early conclusion – was an opportunity to share in her frustrations, but also suggested that Round is perhaps not entirely blameless.

Behaving stroppily in front of the few people who did bother to turn up on a wet and windy Monday night – mumbling “if you gave a s**t you would have bought it” in a moody transatlantic drawl when punting her latest album Tigermending, for instance – was never exactly going to help speed stardom’s arrival.

Round is entitled to expect far bigger audiences – and a far bigger audience would have found loads to enjoy. All cleavage-flaunting dress, red high heels and heavy eyeliner, she looked the part and then some. Her somersaulting voice is a force of nature, and she’s an excellent guitarist. The slinky Pick Up The Phone and foot-stomping Girl and the Ghost are each tunes strong enough to earn Round a piece of the acclaim and sales of a Feist, Jenny Lewis or Sharon Van Etten.

Eventually telling the one guy who noisily voiced approval throughout that he’d earned a free CD was a mood-lightening spot of PR – more of that would have been welcome. I’ve seen lesser artists triumph on slower, wetter nights with a similarly friendly approach.