Jessie Ware - iTunes Festival @ The Roundhouse, London 18/09/14

Her personality is as winning as ever - the bigger venues and broader exposure have done nothing to curtail her wildly enthusiastic stage banter. She’s the sort of person who can interrupt her flow to complement an audience member’s dancing without it seeming dorky. She can stop to talk to someone – who you, of course, cannot hear at all – and have it seem charming, rather than annoying or contrived. Above all else, Jessie Ware is a thoroughly likeable performer, with a group of contemporary-fresh, readily-digestible pop songs to match.

As a live vocalist, she undoubtedly surpasses her own recordings. On her LPs, her voice is pristine but demure. Tonight, songs like the show stopping closer “Say You Love Me” see her voice expand into cinematic, world class soul. Even on her quieter moments, her range also comes further to the fore – moving through octaves and registers at the turn of a line, under complete command of her melodies even in the slightest throwaway moments. Her earliest singles were mainly commended for their tidy production. Tonight’s set proves that it’s actually her voice which could be her real ace in the hole as her career goes on.

The songs themselves also fare better in performance than they have in the studio. Early cuts from Ware’s new record have, at least on a first pass, sound a little blander than we might have expected. Compared to something like FKA Twigs’ debut LP – a record with exactly the sense of electronic adventure and outright sexiness which I thought might have made up Ware’s second record – there’s an element of featureless to her production. But live, the details come to the fore, and what sounds like featurelessness on record is heard as subtle elegance in performance.

Tonight’s airing of “Want Your Feeling” builds a forceful cumulative momentum; expanding its textures towards an improvised jam at its close. On record, the song barely moves past its own starting line; hugging a tinny riff which tonight’s version thrillingly buries under rhythm and sound. “Kind Of… Sometimes… Maybe” yields similar success, morphing, zig-zagging and convulsing under Ware’s vocals, all the while firmly locked into its gyrating groove. Perhaps the recorded versions reveal their secrets more slowly, but they’d still have an uphill struggle to best the visceral glide of tonight’s show. In this sense, tonight’s set is a victim of its own success in showing the full potential of these songs, and highlighting the slightly missed opportunities of her recorded output