Mercury Lounge

Quilt use close harmony and interlocking guitars to make drone rock. that doesn’t always drone or rock but always holds your attention. Or: Quilt bought Surrealistic Pillow, threw away the album but learnt to play the sleeve. Or: Shane is tall. John needs a shave and Anna has the prettiest eyes.

Her voice is a beautiful instrument that would be as lovely performing English folk like Fairport Convention as the hard rock, she preferred last night. Catching her today is akin to catching Florence Welch five years ago

Give the man credit where due, he is an excellent songwriter and his half hour set with his backing band Buzzard Boy was filled with catchy well paid, well sung and, damn it, well executed songs. It takes him around three songs but by the third Sean has found a groove and in a band that moves on its spaces, nothing is much more important

Laura’s singing was vigorous and her organ pounding just enough to make sure you were absolutely certain she could play it well if never enough to distract from her role as front woman. The rest of the band were fine but background.

They look like Ivy League folk boys, like Mumford And Sons, but, on stage at least, they give into the music all the time and have a thunderous sound, more than capable of intricating violin and mandolin into a song, more than happy to throw out everything but drums and handclaps.

Best of all is Marcellus’s inspired steal of the hook to “Big Yellow Taxi” on “Star Position” -a terrific song and a promise that the man is the real thing. As for the set? An orange is an orange but so is a carrot.

While the songs sound uncomfortable, like a new sofa you can’t adjust to, the between song patter sounds studied and schticky. It is hard to dismiss a set in which you loved virtually every song, but hard or not, this wasn’t a very good set.

King dropped her guitar, picked up her banjo and got quite nice. Her good humor got the better of me and her self evident penultimate moment”Good to be A Man” was only beaten by her ultimate moment, a hip hop singalong song about having her pussy sucked.

Dressed in jeans and a printed tee, Ed enjoined the stage with an emotionally bent opening number. Moving between two mics, one taping to a loop he (over) uses as back up to his sole accompaniment, an acoustic guitar

Maybe she should change her name to Miranda Schwartz and move to Nashville. God knows, there is always a market somewhere for gifted songwriters who can do it all on stage.

It took me a while to get into them in concert, to see their layers, to uncover that bit of spark