A year ago, R&B singer Kelela Mizanekristos was a telemarketer flogging solar panels, and she sure learned how to suck the light from a room. Hard on the heels of FKA twigs, Kelela takes to the sparse stage in a sheer black dress, touting a similar brand of desecrated R&B – mainstream pop tropes slashed, drugged and disfigured into art. The mindset of this new generation of pop defilers is never clearer than when she stops her version of Bok Bok’s Melba’s Call, offended by it edging towards accessibility, and tells her technician to play the screw-up, half-speed remix instead. “It sounds like Prince’s dead band,” she self-reviews, “I always go for the fucked-up version.”

It’s an attitude that garnered plaudits for her 2013 mix-tape Cut 4 Me from Björk, Solange Knowles and the end-of-year polls. But watching her spiral her acrobatic soul vocals over laptop backing tracks by DJs from the exploratory Fade to Mind and Night Slugs labels is more sonically intriguing than exciting. It’s like observing a backstreet autopsy on chart music – there’s a morbid fascination to the graveyard rave of Floor Show or the way Send Me Out sounds like Rihanna running out of battery. Distorted, unnatural wails turn Go All Night into a soul gig on Solaris, Oicu’s dislocated trip-hop drums and unearthly piano could win exorcism week on X Factor, and the first single from her new album, A Message, resembles lusty mourning at Portishead’s funeral. You applaud the artistry, but keep a safe distance.

It’s heartening that artists like Kelela are out to dismantle and reconfigure a genre that has been polished and research-grouped to static perfection over decades, but it’s only when the mechanical throbs and guillotine beats of Keep It Cool come on like a Saw soundtrack you can dance to that she begins to incorporate pop’s insistent groove. It’s a welcome chink of light in the crepuscular world of R&B’s Annabelle.