Sylvan Esso at The Workman’s Club, Tuesday 7th October 2014

Festival season has officially come to a close, and it takes a crowd like the one assembled for Sylvan Esso at The Workman’s to remember why that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The thing about festivals is that often large sections of a crowd at a performance have wandered over to whatever stage happens to be nearest them at a given time on a given day. You approach festivals to be impressed, and if you aren’t, well there’s probably tonnes of other acts knocking about who will make the investment in time and money worthwhile.

The Workman’s crowd reminds us of the atmosphere when the whole crowd specifically turns out for one act, and nobody’s more taken aback by the crowd’s enthusiasm than the band themselves. Sylvan Esso, for the unschooled, are a two-piece electropop act from North Carolina, consisting of singer Amelia Meath and producer Nick Sanborn. Their debut self-titled album was released this year and that album makes up all of the songs featured in tonight’s set.

The songs on ‘Sylvan Esso’ worked within the confines of fairly familiar sounds for anyone interested in electro music. In the same 12-month period where acts like John Grant and St. Vincent are really experimenting with what electronic music is capable of, Sylvan Esso’s sound was rather conventional in contrast. For this reason their album perhaps didn’t quite get the accolades it deserved on its original release. And it deserved quite a few, as besides being a bit conventional each song on the album is a high quality piece of songwriting.

Any great live performance should give perspectives on an act’s music that you simply don’t consider when you only have the audio element. Indeed when you watch Meath’s dance moves on the stage while Sanborn knocks out the beats, the hip-hop influence in the structure of the songs becomes explicit. Even when she sings she raises her hand in the air like a rapper, but still her voice and those familiar electronic tones are what dominate the music. The electronic sounds are gritty in contrast to the drums which largely feel like they’ve been softened, and with Meath’s vocal over this the music, wildly danceable as it is, has a great sensitivity to it.

Actually, it’s a rather emotional performance, as Meath and Sanborn are clearly very touched by the reception they’re getting. Towards the end of Coffee the crowd beats Meath to the closing refrain of “my baby does the hanky-panky/my baby does” and the silence that greets encore number Come Down – the only downbeat song all evening – is fairly absolute in the packed venue. The performance of that latter song is a good example of how the live setting alters the impression of the song. The shock when you hear the hum that opens it is absent in the recorded version because you’re aware it’s being used as an intentional evocation of atmosphere, whereas in the live setting the loud amp hum at first feels like a mistake, then you realise it’s the melodic base of the song. Later in the song, the sound of a needle dragging along a vinyl groove amplifies the nostalgic element present in the lyrics “You wash my hair/like you washed my hair/for years and years.”

And so Sylvan Esso came and let the gathered multitude know that, yes in fact they have produced one of the best albums of the year, even if it is using electronic sounds that we’ve grown used to over the years. What damn difference does that make when they write and perform songs this good?