tUnE-yArDs – Royal Festival Hall, London 05/03/15

09 March 2015, 11:00 | Written by Russell Warfield

(Live)

(Tune-Yards)

I may never forget the first time I heard w h o k i l l. It was a moon landing moment. I’d never heard – any perhaps haven’t since – an album so alive with the thrill of sound, and so stuffed with ideas. I called it then: she was going to be headlining festivals in five years’ time. And tonight, bringing a packed Royal Festival Hall to their feet within minutes just four years later in 2015, my prediction is sitting pretty well.

Merrill Garbus makes music which makes you glad to be alive. Tonight’s climax of “Business" might be the closest you can expect to hearing to pure joy - strong, visceral, powerful joy. Replacing the saxophone parts with two vocalists, the thing extends, builds and grooves into a sheer wall of sound that brings tears to the eyes purely through its quality. It’s an experience to cherish among your finest memories.

Moments like this are not rare. The grinding, noisy tumult of “Stop That Man” – running on and on and on and on and on, through increasingly frantic layers of chaos – turns an album low point into a set highlight. And the seemingly ramshackle “Es-So” – loaded with stuttered pauses and jerking tempo changes, in duet between just ukulele and bass – is the jewel in the crown for bewildering complexity. It’s an absolute stunner of a moment.

It’s easy – and tempting – to fall into swooning clichés when you’re talking about Merrill Garbus. And when it’s the Southbank Centre’s annual Women of the World Festival, the most obvious accolade to give her is to say that she’s not really of this world. Her voice seems unnatural at times – louder, quieter, more expressive, expansive and malleable than seems possible. Her ability to syncopate, loop, play drums and subvert all three simultaneously is mind warping.

But in spite of all this, she’s emphatically a woman of this world. What’s never lost in her song writing is her essentially human quality. The lyrics are loaded with the corporeal, the material essentials of life: water, lungs, blood. As she says herself: she’s a real thing. This is what is perhaps so rapturous about tUnE-yArDs – no matter how unattainably talented Garbus is, and she genuinely is one of the standout live performers touring today, she’s effortlessly relatable. She’s a woman of the world. But she’s a world of a woman. Tonight’s set is mainly beyond description – truly masterful.