I’m reluctant to use words like strange or peculiar when discussing live music, but at times, like during Laura Sheeran’s intrinsically unfamiliar What The World Knows show in Whelan’s, they’re the only ones that fit.
It’s a dangerous game, this lumping an artist into the freak category. For one, there’s always the chance that the musician in question is hatching a chart-friendly pop symphony to rival Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl.
For two, by the time this publication hits coffee tables, there could be a whole host of Sheeran copycats replicating her avant garde style, so that playing the bowed saw and punctuating lyrics with theatrical arm flails could seem every bit as ordinary as a David Guetta and Kelly Rowland collaboration in 130 bpm.
Still, looking at Sheeran now, a visual feast of glitter and mesh and facial jewels, no-one can convince me that she’s not a genuine musical oddity.
Throwing her arms around her head to the stark melody of ‘It’s Been A Long Day’ and bellowing out in a beautiful, pained yelp, she’s the very convincing leader of her own mini-orchestra, which tonight includes cello, accordion, harp, flute, mandolin, beatbox (more on that later) and countless pieces of electronic gadgetry.
More Fever Ray’s Karin Elisabeth Dreijer than Gaga, Sheeran builds her songs by adding stranger and stranger elements to the soundscape, always the instrument, arrangement or breakdown that you’re not expecting. At first, it’s a little off-putting, especially when your brain is telling you that you’re headed in one direction and Sheeran yanks you in the other, but by the time we get around to eerie closing number ‘Lonesome Soldier’, I find myself willing her to let all her musical madness out, for no reason other than I rather like where it’s all going.
Of course, nothing is quite as surreal as the moment when Ivor Novello-winning Brit Ed Sheeran, Laura’s first cousin, no less, joins her on stage to provide a beatbox backing to a scuzzy early track. I don’t know how, but they make it work.
Material from Sheeran’s sinister second album What The World Knows easily steals the spotlight, especially the earth-shaking ‘Redlight’ and the winding ‘Forever Love’, but longtime fans are catered to, too, as Adrian Crowley chimes in for a rendition of their 2010 collaboration ‘Lupine Rot’.
Sheeran, much like freak pop queen Björk, has a personality to match her songs – she shows this by giddily tripping over her words, making the audience chuckle with her very un-avant garde banter (“This is one I wrote about an a-hole!”) and generally being completely adorable.
On seeing Sheeran’s alter ego Glitterface perform as part of synth pop duo Nanu Nanu a couple of weeks back, I dubbed the 26-year-old a rare bird of the Irish underground. Tonight’s show saw her leap out from behind the caricature, and thankfully, prove me right.