JULIA HOLTER | LIVE REVIEW
From Now On @ Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Fri 12 Feb
So, Julia Holter is a big deal, right? Media darling, a record in the 2015 top 10 lists of pretty much everyone who thinks they’re anyone, and the big pull, the star attraction for the From Now On 2016 festival. But if that’s the case, how does she find herself doing an extended soundcheck in a small underfilled room in Chapter in front of a vitually motionless middle-aged audience of chinstroking, headnodding real ale types? There is plenty of room at the back, folks… and the middle… and the front. Only the stage is packed, with barely room to twirl a double bass.
This doesn’t seem to fit with the hype. Surely the trajectory of a nascent superstar of experimental, jazz-tinged rock isn’t meant to cut through this corner of suburbia on a wet Friday in February, is it? Julia asks the audience if Cardiff is cool, to distract attention from an extended twiddle with the keyboard settings. The audience is eloquent in the awkward silence of its reply: no, we are not. The chat stops in its tracks, never to restart, and a song starts with the knobs set to sort-of-OK. And the music is sort of OK too. But in the end, audience and band are left bathed in lukewarm underwhelmth.
Listening later to last year’s album, Have You In My Wilderness, something important and vital has been lost in translation, a botched transplant has swapped the transcedant for the mundane. It is clear this should have been better; and probably somewhere else, on a different day, in front of a better crowd.
Like, say, the Colston Hall in Bristol, possibly on a Sunday, for example at the 6 Music festival.
words MAT DAVIES photos ADAM CHARD