Live Review: FKA Twigs

FKA Twigs doesn’t have ‘something’, she has all the things.

The diminutive 27-year-old Londoner sailed into 2014 as an ‘artist to watch’ and finished the year as a Mercury Prize-nominee and everywhere ‘it’ girl of the new R&B scene. A mother lode of hype precedes her and it is warranted; she’s a hypnotic, fully formed conceptual artist, goddess-like on stage. Her voice is good, but it’s a fraction of the package. Her look, her moves and music are fascinating. Her voice is just window dressing.

There is a long, languid preamble to her set at 170 Russell, but the crowd roars as FKA twigs (aka Tahliah Barnett) wafts onto the stage. She is framed by three band members, stationed at three trigger pads that face inwards. At the centre of the stage FKA twigs is twitching and writhing in a cloud of dry ice. She drifts in and out of that cloud for the next hour, backlit by sharp shards of light, like something mythical emerging, stalking the edge of a swamp.

The production is beautiful. The percussionists smack out sparse, epic beats and glassy glitch bursts, recalling but radically overhauling the minimalism of trip hop. FKA twigs croons in a high register, around the beats and samples of her own voice, which are layered, almost imperceptive, over her live vocal performance. She slinks staccato through Lights On and whispers sweetly through Water Me, drops into aching soul for Numbers and affects a disembodied, robotic singsong voice for Video Girl. The tempo is steady, verging on monotonous, but her slight modulations draw you in. You sink into it.

So, yeah, the music is wonderful. But the real showstopper here is the interplay between the beats and her body, between her body and the lyrical thrust of her songs. FKA Twigs is a professional dancer and her muscles coil around her bones like wire. Her dance moves are more angular and artful than suggestive, but they still turn something in your solar plexus. She sings about sex and love with a limp, coquettish, self-sacrificing air, constantly laying herself out as an object of pleasure, but her body is so strong and purposeful that it upsets any idea that she is just sexy. She is probably the sexiest performer you will ever see, but there is so much else going on up there. It’ll be interesting to see where it leads.