The singer blended 70s soul records with a heavy dose of autotune in a beautifully delicate performance
★★★
The name of Shura’s heady, slowburn summer album, forevher, “encapsulates a few things,” she has said. “For her”, “forever” and also “forever her”, she told an interviewer. In her carefully-thought out show at the Roundhouse, she charted the “for her” intimacy of the new long-distance relationship that inspired the album, while deeper “forever” themes of fear, yearning and queer relationships bubbles below the surface.
The highlight was when she brought out a troop of lesbian nuns in sunglasses who danced with her in front of pillars of rainbow lights through “religion (u can lay your hands on me)”, a song about surviving being apart from her girlfriend. It’s was tongue-in-cheek visual nodding to the song’s well-received music video set in a dope nunnery, so gently subversive you almost miss its frankness. “We’ve been talking on the telephone for hours at night, whilst I’ve been thinking about kissing you, I wanna consecrate your body,” she sang. In “flyin’”, she notes the strangeness of religion: “I read it in a bible when I was just a kid . . . A virgin had a baby, it’s crazy.”
But the synth-pop album is also extremely “online”, with its lower case titles, and songs about Skype calls and airplane mode. “I got off the plane and turned my phone on, So I could read what you sent me when I was, thirty thousand feet above the ground,” she sang in the gorgeous ballad “princess leia”.
Alexandra “Shura” Denton, who is from Manchester but now splits her time between Brooklyn and New York, threw a lifeline to people who felt like queer outsiders with her 2016 debut, Nothing’s Real, which charts break ups and existential angst. Her new album is less glitzy, more mature, and even more beautifully delicate, blending 70s soul records, Joni Mitchell influences and a dose of autotune. It isn’t a vast departure from her previous sounds, though, and, perhaps aware of this, she interwove songs from the two albums. The lights dipped to the same deep blue that is on the cover of forevher when she sang its songs, opening with “BKLYNDN” – Brooklyn London – in her signature wide-brimmed hat, flanked by a drummer and guitarist.
She picked her best songs in the hour-ish set, keeping “2shy”, “Touch” and 2015’s “White Light” for the end. The crowd drifted away in dreamy “side effects”, her blonde hair and white guitar single focal points in the blue-bathed room. “Lying by the sea with you, and I know this is not our place, but we can always swim as if it is,” she sang.
The show was as easy to listen to as her albums and she is a warm, welcoming performer. There was the occasional dip towards the slightly naff – in her opening song she keeps laughing in a weirdly forced way – but the waves of beautiful, delicate shades of sound are what lingered at the end of the night.
