Between the covers with Julia Holter

By Charlie McCann

Usually, it’s hard to know what Julia Holter is singing about. She gives hints in album titles (“Tragedy”, “Ekstasis”) and you can occasionally make out the odd lyric (“Bright blue flames under my fingers/I’m taken by surprise”). But Holter, a singer and composer from Los Angeles, often mixes her warbles and trills, chants and whispers, so that they puddle together. With underlying washes of sound from violin and cello, her songs are like watercolours, and there’s a beauty in that. But on a damp February night at Oval Space in east London, she sang a different way. Her voice was unclouded, pure – and far more forceful as a result.

Her set was dominated by songs from her latest album, “Have You In My Wilderness”, which was released last September. If her earlier records have a dreamlike quality, on this one, her voice has woken up, in order to tell the tales of Betsy, a suicidal woman standing on a roof, and Tiburcio Vázquez, a 19th-century Californian bandit. Her often wispy voice was now limpid and expressive, with enough power to give life to her characters. As Vázquez, her voice stabbed the air with proud braggadocio; as a spectator watching Betsy, she keened with horror.