Gentle genius: Julia Holter live in London

Undoubtedly, she has refined her songwriting; distilling her vast range of avant garde, classical, drone and jazz ideas into frameworks more closely resembling four minute pop songs. You couldn’t imagine the shimmering simplicity of “Feel You” on her debut, for example. But she’s scarcely reined in her ambition to get to this point. She’s in little danger of a crossover hit.

At the Islington Assembly Hall in London tonight (12th November), Holter plays with a relatively stripped back arrangement – her on keys, accompanied by drums, upright bass and viola. There’s no rasping sax or guitar as on some previous tours, meaning that the songs get their cleanest and most spacious renditions. As such, they’re quite inviting – happy for you to settle in, explore their contours a bit more, and show just as much heart as brain. For people who find Holter too knotty and intense, this is a gentler entrance to her songs.

But there’s no getting away from the fact that – however they’re arranged, and no matter how the human dimension of her song writing continues to develop – there’s a certain veneer of coldness to Holter’s performance. There’s an impenetrable perfection to her music. There’s always a slight distance. The warmest moments are those which lean the most heavily on her sassy jazz influences – her vocal take for “In The Green Wild” evolved to the point of dance; syllables slyly skipping across the percussion. But cuts like “How Long?” take the drone and classical influences of her early work and awkwardly shoehorn them into a four (no five, no six…) minute song. If Holter ever opens herself up to accusations of being aloof and boring, it’s at moments like these.

But this is me playing devil’s advocate. Because really, I’m someone who adores her complexities and idiosyncrasies, and tonight is as strong a show as you would expect from Holter on that front – especially touring off the material of yet another stunning album. It’s astonishing that she can pack so many details, concepts, influences and ideas into records, without running out of steam even slightly – arguably getting better with each LP, in fact. And so as pleasant as the simpler arrangements are, it’s still wonderful to hear the moments where they really open up into noise, menace and atonal squalor.

It’s her drift towards pop which gets the final say today, with a charming encore of “Betsy On The Roof” and “Sea Calls Me Home”. But while the melodies of songs like ‘Silhouette’ are absolutely gorgeous, they’re ultimately unlikely to win her any new listeners. Not that I particularly expect that she cares. She has no apologies to make for being anything other than Julia Holter – one of the most singular composers and song writers we have in music today.