Rap that feels like a sociology lecture: Loyle Carner at Alexandra Palace reviewed

A few years ago, I asked the young American soul singer Leon Bridges — a latter-day Sam Cooke, with the old-fashioned song arrangements to match — if he ever pondered the incongruity of being a black man, backed by a white band, playing music in the African-American tradition to audiences that (in the UK at least) were almost entirely white. ‘I have a song called “Brown Skin Girl”,’ he replied, ‘and I ask “Where my brown-skinned girls at?” And there’s maybe one or two in the crowd. It’s a little awkward sometimes.’

His words came to mind watching Adia Victoria. Despite her being an African-American woman signed to a major label — her brilliant album Silences came out on Atlantic earlier this year — the audience in the upstairs room of a London pub was almost entirely white. Like Bridges, she draws on older traditions. She plays a version of the blues that borrows thematically, rather than musically. Racial and sexual oppression in the South, where she grew up and still lives, run through her songs like bindweed intertwining with ivy.

That makes her sound like a sociology lecturer, which does her a grave disservice. Despite the slightly deadening nature of playing to a half-empty room, she turned up the charm and the charisma at the Lexington. She goes against stereotypes of what the blues might mean: her voice, though true and perfectly pitched, is breathy and slight rather than a huge roar, more Billie Holliday than Bessie Smith; the music borrows as much from indie rock as from Robert Johnson. For this show, she didn’t have the full band that made Silences such a thrill, just a keyboard player and another guitarist alongside her; she provided the rhythm — the donkey work — the other chap added squalls and jags and windblown echoes.