Weyes Blood @ QMU, Glasgow, 10 Feb

You’d be forgiven for wondering if the light-absorbing monochrome walls, floors and fixtures of the QMU makes it the most appropriate venue when Natalie Mering enters a stage that has been readily prepared for what could be a coming sacrificial rite. Look a little closer at the lit candelabras, and you’ll notice no fire burning from their wicks. A necessary safety feature, yes, but also a hint at the measured artifice Mering has conjured as Weyes Blood. Throughout her performance – a showcase for her latest album And In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow and its predecessor Titanic Rising – Mering draws attention to that world-building. 

This is a show driven by exceptional musicianship and artistry. Every song is note perfect, the tone of the playing full of warmth and richness. Sonically, Mering is a classical artist, her style evoking the singer-songwriters of the 60s. But her words are full of itchy, modern distress, and that contrast shines through onstage, as quick to spar with the crowd over the validity and merits of astrology as she is to pull out self-aware dad dance moves, all in a billowing Picnic at Hanging Rock dress. She’s very funny: “Where do you guys go to have fun? The necropolis?”

For an artist with a setlist that doesn’t deviate much from a loping tempo, she is not a static performer, striding around the stage. She utterly owns it. Beautiful flourishes from her band – metallic, stabbing solos on Andromeda, or the gurgling organs on A Given Thing – also ensure that, even as songs draw out, there’s always something surprising lurking in the next verse.

The centrepiece of the night is Mering’s performance of God Turn Me Into a Flower, a song which has long interrogated symbolic roots. For me, the song is linked to Han Kang’s book The Vegetarian, and the idea of exhibiting plant-like vulnerability in the face of great strain. For this tour, British documentarian and collagist Adam Curtis has provided a set of visuals very typical of his style, filled with film clips, news reels and archival footage that veer from comic to manic. Juxtaposed with this beautiful song, impeccably performed, it really is something special. To the right of the stage, there is a stairwell in the QMU. It’s pitch dark, but there’s a flickering light at the top just out of view. It’s both scary and serene. In the moment, it seemed Mering would walk off stage and ascend the steps, disappearing into some higher plane.

Later, during Twin Flame, Mering clicks an attachment on her chest, under her dress, taking on the image on the cover of the latest album, her heart literally aglow. During Movies – the climax to which is the only time the band allow the song to get gloriously loud and out of control – she is lit from the front by a blue spotlight, creating the impression of her performing submerged in water. It’s all simple but effective theatre.

At the beginning of the show, Mering sang the opening words to It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody: 'Sitting at this party / Wondering if anyone knows me / Really sees who I am?' By the end of the night, on closing number Everyday, the audience is eating out the palm of her hand. At least by the people in this room, her question has been answered.