When the top is your comfort zone: Chairlift live in London

On their last record, Chairlift still had some shyness; a slightly vulnerable and distant sheen to their synth-led pop songs. This year’s Moth is a stark contrast. It’s brash, mature and sexy, and this is a concert which builds on that mood.

On record they’re a duo, but tonight (9 March) at London's Scala they’re joined by live rhythm and saxophone. The sound is as big as possible, while also freeing up Polachek to play the part of full blown popstar. These songs demand it. You couldn’t perform something as cocksure as "Show U Off" as a duo, or stuck behind a little synthesiser. Thankfully, Polachek is an assured frontwoman, confident in herself and in her material. And with songs as huge as the addictive, pulsating "Moth To A Flame" – delivered towards the set’s climax with aplomb– the confidence is rightly placed. This is high calibre pop music.

Older material is retrofitted to suit their new instincts for massive pop. A welcome turn from last album highlight "I Belong In Your Arms" is stripped of its synths, and replaced with a slower, sultry groove and slap bass runs. On record, it rushed with the thrill of young love. Now it oozes with sex, and Chairlift sell it effortlessly.

None of this is to say that Chairlift are constantly at full throttle, propelled by groove and low end. The seams of melancholy that coloured their earlier works still find an outlet in material like the gorgeous little weeper "Crying In Public" and the cinematic "Unfinished Business". Songs like these inject an element of humanity and dynamic into what could otherwise have become a soulless catalogue of massive bangers.

Indeed, the biggest gamble Chairlift took in this transition to the centre of pop song writing is that they could have lost the character of Polachek’s voice among identikit backdrops of huge, stadium sized arrangements. Thankfully, that hasn’t happened at all, and her vocal remains one of the band’s primary strengths. On record, the glitch falsetto hook of "Polymorphing" sounds like it might be difficult to replicate live. It’s executed flawlessly. She’s a versatile singer, and her voice continues to widen its deceptively powerful range

From start to finish, this is a consistently strong set, full of songs which prove that Polachek’s contribution to Beyonce’s record wasn’t a fluke. It didn’t even really push her out of her comfort zone. This is simply the level at which Chairlift are operating at now. They’ve put out a whole album of colourful, pulsating pop, and they have a live show which more than rises to meet it.