Uneasy listening: Kathryn Joseph, at Summerhall, reviewed

I have always been fascinated by artists who bounce between tonal extremes when performing, particularly the ones who serve their songs sad and their stagecraft salty.

Adele, for example, fills the space between each plushily upholstered soul-baring ballad by transforming into a saucy end-of-pier variety act, coo-cooing at the crowd and cursing like a squaddie. John Lennon gurned and clowned his way through the Beatles’ concerts, subverting the naked suicidal plea of ‘Help!’ in the process. John Martyn would belch and joust in mock-Cockney at the conclusion of a particularly sensitive piece. Jackie Leven punctuated songs of immense pain and sadness with eye-watering stories of defecating in alleyways and getting blootered with the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard.

A bipolar approach to performance can puncture reverence, acting as a knee-jerk spasm against stifling solemnity. It can also be deployed as a defence mechanism to protect overly exposed nerve endings. It is certainly one way to keep an audience on its mettle and in a state of pliable unease. Yet it can be hard to gauge how much of this approach is a conscious strategy, and how much the unfiltered leaking out of an artist’s innate nature.

Which brings us to Kathryn Joseph. A singularly serious artist, Joseph won the 2015 Scottish Album of the Year award with her debut album Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled. She has delivered on that early promise. Last year’s For You Who are Wronged was widely acclaimed – and justly so. Her music is sparse and spooky. Her words have the plainly poetic cadences of a spell or a curse.

Yet in Edinburgh, she salted her sorrow with between-song tales of such intimate embarrassment one would hesitate to share them with a best friend, never mind a paying audience.