Certain English female singing voices make a direct grab for the central nervous system. From Sandy Denny to Sarah Nixey, Maddy Prior to Sarah Cracknell and Trish Keenan, they’re a little wistful, a little old fashioned and entirely enthralling. Jane Weaver’s voice is among them: capable of a clear, resonant stillness one moment, the next bringing a wonderful bruised depth to her disco folk.
Tonight, at this tiny venue (the stage so poky she decides to dispense with the rigmarole of going on and off for the encore, choosing simply just to pick back up and play on), Weaver’s voice is perfectly framed. The sound is immaculate, allowing for every intimacy of her intonation.
Her set draws largely from two of her three most recent albums – 2014’s career-igniting The Silver Globe and this year’s stunning Modern Kosmology. Her metier is perfectly poised psychedelia, with a swell of hallucinatory disco, underpinned by kraut rhythms and 80s synths. Live, this is a genre often given to over-indulgence (and lest we forget Modern Kosmology is an album inspired by Swedish abstract artist Hilma af Klint’s seances, spiritualism and the science of anthropophosy – not, one might think, easy topics to melodicise) but it’s striking how tight this set is. There are no flabby, thought-straying moments across its hour-long run. The stand out moment comes with The Lightning Back, a whirring, twinkling, synth masterpiece that brings three and a half minutes of celestial pop to the room.
It’s noticeable how even live the swarming intricacies of the music never detract from the fineness of the lyrics – on the sublime Slow Motion for example, the refrain, “Let’s go outside when it doesn’t feel right / We can disappear, I disappear”, seems to be granted its own room to breathe.
Often as Weaver sings she lifts her face, as if to better find the light, or hear some distant call – a beguiling, otherworldly movement. But just as charmingly, once the music fades she abruptly drops the pose, and her between-song chatter and inter-band conversation is conducted with a pleasing plainness and a Widnes accent: “What key’s it in again? D minor?” she asks her band before they play a new track from the soon-to-be-released Architect EP. “There you go, we’re fine, we’re fine,” she decrees, before she lifts her face once more and steps back into the dream world.
