SOHN - Shepherd's Bush Empire, London 12/09/2014

Born and raised in London, SOHN (Toph Taylor) now commutes between the capital and his home in a quiet part of Vienna, far enough away to provide respite from the cramped sprawl of Europe’s busiest hub, close enough to draw energy from its thrill and buzz. It’d be easy to extrapolate this dichotomy and apply it his music, at once twitchy and nervous, all cut up vocal samples and Postal Service inflected electronic bleeps, at once serene and transcendent, with moments of space and calm breaking through the noise, acting like a clearing in an urban jungle. The shadows cast here bring to mind the quiet foreboding of the silhouettes on the Viennese walls in Carol Reed’s The Third Man. His songs follow an established pattern: busy beats are layered onto thick synths and vocoders reminiscent of Justin Vernon and Kanye West’s collaborations, before breaking apart abruptly, leaving holes and breathing room which are in turn filled with glorious, soulful falsetto. There’s an attention to detail in the song structures that is clearly the work of an expert producer, sensitive to the needs of the music. Which is exactly what SOHN is.

The most obvious musical bedfellow for SOHN is probably James Blake, and there’s more than enough crossover in the maudlin minimalism on show here to warrant comparison. But beneath the surface there’s also a hint of the smooth R&B of Seal. There is a new soul renaissance currently underway in the UK, high on emotive atmospherics, and SOHN is leading the charge. It’s icily cold electronic music, but with his very human voice at its beating heart, bursting with feeling and power.

As well as being a remarkable performer and songwriter in his own right, SOHN is making a name for himself as a producer of note, and tonight he invites two recent collaborators onto the stage in a show of this scene’s strength. Rising star Kwabs and tonight’s opener Laura Doggett deliver a mesmerising performance of the former’s "Last Stand". Hearing these three voices dovetail and swell is nothing short of spellbinding: they are proper singers, eschewing generic pop production in favour of something deeper and richer. SOHN and co might not quite be inventing the wheel, but they’re certainly rolling it down a fascinating path. “I’ve been waiting ages to be able to do that”, SOHN says with obvious pride.

Clad in an almost monastic black hood and cape, SOHN and his two band mates spend the entire show seated at their stations on a triptych of raised platforms, backed by LED strips and gunfire strobe bursts. The room’s energy is generated mainly by the central figure’s lungs. The set’s clear highlight is during a slow-jam rendition of ‘Tempest’, the opening track from last year’s excellent album Tremors. The packed house is stunned into reverential slack-jawed silence as SOHN’s a cappella acrobatics fill the room, a moment of power and virtuosity that is so delicate you feel as though you have to hold your breath for fear it will break. That single extraordinary minute is worth the entrance price alone.

As the set enters its final movement, SOHN brings out the big guns, (“It’s all party from here on in”) and we’re treated to the bombast of his uber-earworm floor-fillers "Artifice" and "The Wheel". The place is alive, jumping. That’s the thing about SOHN; one minute he can take the breath away, with the soaring, staggering beauty of his voice, and the next he has us throwing shapes in abandon. He flits between the deft and the danceable. He’ll continue to produce, and we’ll wager you’ll be hearing his influence increase in the months to come as more young singers see him as the go-to man for a progressive contemporary sound. And with the voice he has, alongside a taste for the dramatic, intense focus and attention to detail, don’t be surprised if he starts to challenge those more mainstream peers at the upper reaches of the charts. His recent iTunes Festival appearance alongside Sam Smith might not be quite as incongruous as it first seems. His voice is every bit as good. His music is a hell of a lot more interesting. With an excellent debut and a faultless live show, what he does next could be extraordinary.