claire rousay @ The Glad Cafe, 31 May

It is a point often made but musicians find themselves in an awkward position at the minute. Artists have a strange split that they have to make in the social media age: they not only have to make the work itself, but to be its ever-present face, constantly being on, a ready stream of content irrespective of their real headspace.

claire rousay has always had a skill for balancing this, marrying the breakneck work rate of her sublimely emotive collages with a sardonic and often wilfully silly persona a long way from the self-seriousness of many of her avant-garde contemporaries. But the weight of this balance is key to rousay’s latest record sentiment, and it’s that record we get, near enough in full tonight. That record's cover is played out on stage, her ersatz bedroom backdrop, complete with two walls and a bed, all working to sculpt a complex web of personal exposure and artifice. 

The record itself – much narrativised as flipping rousay's emo-ambient into ambient-emo – draws on the harrowing domestics of the likes of Carissa’s Wierd, but stripped of momentum and robotised so that it sounds like HAL’s most melancholy diary entries. It should be said that treating this as rousay’s first shift into more typical ‘songs’ is pretty disingenuous; the wonky pop she’s made with More Eaze is some of her best work, but this tour is rousay foregrounding herself as a traditional singer-songwriter for the first time.

Image: claire rousay's staging @ The Glad Cafe, Glasgow, 31 May by Chris Hogge

The record isn’t the sort of thing you can necessarily imagine translating brilliantly to a live setting, and early doors there are some hiccups. After the magnificent 4pm plays back in full, its rock bottom paean to the universe acting as a sort of antimatter negative to Metallica stampeding out amid Morricone fanfare, there’s a good deal of padding. Sometimes rousay is noodling on guitar, but often she’s quite literally padding about whilst her laptop plays back the record's ambient interludes. There’s nothing innately wrong with this kind of anti-theatrical theatricality of course, and when speaking to the audience rousay is never less than funny and engaging, but it seems a waste when her solo shows have been such magnificent, improvisatory feats in the past, conjuring the beautiful from the scrapes of chairs and murmurs of the audience.

That said, when it gets going, it really goes. The songs find a new heft in this environment, rousay’s mixture of vulnerability and offhanded silliness making the whole thing feel warm and human amongst the often bleak lyrical landscapes. Seeing her twist, mic in hands around the words of asking for it unearths the song as something far closer to a Yung Lean ballad, both more wrenching and anthemic than on record. lover’s spit plays in the background similarly feels even more pronouncedly wounded, totally weightless in its deft arpeggiated sorrow. 

It’s a set that has its lags, but rousay’s talent shines through, showing she remains a reliable talent, whatever form she takes.