Live Review: Alice Glass, Zola Jesus

Zola Jesus opens the show with massive technical difficulties, a problem that sadly haunts her for the entire set.

Understandably she doesn’t seem comfortable and just isn’t quite in the zone tonight. Her half bondage, half Kate Bush-style red top and head veil is getting in her way and rather than adding to the mystique, every self-conscious flick makes her look awkward and actually interferes with her vocals. She warms into the performance a little by the final song but it’s clear that the violin induced feedback became such an issue that it’s thrown her entirely and she really just wants to get off the stage.

Alice Glass raises the bar, opening with Forgiveness from her self-titled EP; a song title that offers a particularly ironic message given its repetitive, unrelenting aggression. Aggression is a thinly veiled theme that continues for the remainder of the set. She’s an A-grade performer, the kind who’s so slick you wonder how closely she’s studied legends like Debbie Harry and Kylie Minogue — it’s a full tilt stadium-style performance but in a much smaller theatre tonight. Her vocal range is also similar to Minogue’s, comfortably sitting in the higher registers — in fact never moving out of them for the duration of the set. The effect is unrelenting, and coupled with the hard drum’n’bass beats bandmate Jupiter Keyes is offering, our ears and indeed all of our senses tire fast. Their show is well-honed, with Keyes donning the perfect open-mouthed gimp face as he beats a floor tom like Donkey Kong — perfectly rehearsed in his submission to her. The light show is perfect in its fluorescent candy-coloured fury.

The most fascinating thing about Glass’s shtick is that she embodies a kind of Japanese schoolgirl-cum-Harley Quinn character who’s making noises about empowerment but never quite loud enough to be heard over the fanfare of her exterior. It makes it difficult for her message to get through to me. “Tell me where to spit, don’t tell me when to swallow,” she screeches. I suspect most fans here tonight haven’t really heard it — it looks more like they’d prefer to worship and fetishise her because she embodies sexiness and deranged outcast in equal measure — and I can’t tell if she really cares either way. “I’m ready for you to die!” she repeats in Stillbirth with a black-lipsticked maniacal grin, closing off the set. It’s an abrupt ending. Quite a few punters — having turned up just to see what Glass decided to do in a solo show — seem a bit bemused, even ruffled. The die-hard fans, however, leave with huge grins on their faces as if privy to a secret none of the rest of us will ever understand.