Torres @ The Lexington

I love The Lexington. It has separate standard pub and gig spaces, so the music doesn't have to take over your evening if you don't want it to. Its gig space is wide and shallow, meaning that wherever you stand you get a good view and feel intimately connected to the performer. And it has a great range of draught and bottled beer and probaby the biggest selection of bourbons this side of the deep south. Plus it trusts you not to chuck any of those bottled beers at the performers, which is nice. No plastic cups of Tuborg here...

Torres is a singer-songwriter from Nashville. From the cover of her pseudonymically self-titled debut album and the fact that Pitchfork described her voice as one that "conveys raw, urgent desperation, the sort we flinch from instinctually" and her lyrics as "full of tricky, messy subject matter--loaded poses of female need, abjection, subjugation, dominance", I half expected the experience of seeing her live to be a bit like that episode of friends where Chandler gets trapped in the front row of some vagina monologues-esque play.

I was relieved to see that she was to be accompanied by a bassist and a drummer, and actually I needn't have worried at all. Yes Torres is brilliantly capable of conveying raw, urgent desperation, even live, but she also knows not to bludgeon her audience to death with it. This was her first gig in Europe, and she balanced endearing tentative attempts to connect with her audience between songs with extremely impressive vocal displays during them, steadily winning over her initially rather reticent crowd. As an aside, I do enjoy it when someone extrapolates from a roomful of a couple of hundred people to a city of some 8 million. "Hello London!"

Presumably Torres has extensive performing experience under her belt from her home country. On the basis of this showing, her first tour on these shores will not be her last.