My Brightest Diamond live review
The first confounding act of tonight comes before Shara Worden has even taken the stage: My Brightest Diamond’s choice of walk-on music, which plays on for several minutes after the house lights have dimmed, is burbling, nagging and faceless electronica, standing in no little contrast to her own melodic, knotty and characterful chamber rock. The second comes immediately afterwards: Worden and her backing band – a two-piece rhythm section straight from Central Casting’s “jobbing muso” file – are playing not through standard indie-rock amps but something more akin to Fabric’s hulking subs, rendering Pressure’s opening drum solo closer to a kidney-rumbling splash of Carl Craig than anything one could reasonably expect from an act signed to a record label called Asthmatic Kitty.
The rest of the set continues with the intensity of its opener, and Worden revels in it. The transforming of songs from This Is My Hand into propulsive stompalongs, in which the bass and drums do all the heavy lifting, allows Worden’s operatic vocals to soar and swoop around the arrangements with compelling grace, and when she does eventually revert to solo voice and guitar briefly for tear-jerking torch song I Have Never Loved Someone, the shift in force feels wonderfully intimate.
In her final act of defiance, Worden encores with a cover of Fever that sees her vault over the monitors and into the crowd, impishly skipping through her audience with the microphone, delivering different verses of Peggy Lee’s classic to unsuspecting individuals.
The sight of her, barely five foot even with her towering quiff, exchanging twirls with bespectacled and slightly dazzled gig-goers varies from the satisfyingly subversive to the somewhat awkward, but Worden’s sense of rebelliousness shines through regardless: if there’s one refreshing take-home from tonight, it’s that My Brightest Diamond is not to be told what to do.
