Charm, the third album from 26-year-old US singer-songwriter Clairo, was one of last year’s best: 1970s-skewing pop-soul where you could almost sense the warmth of the era’s wood, velvet and corduroy. Played live on this sold-out tour, the lounge-lizard feeling intensifies as her band perform on what looks like an epically proportioned sofa, backed by an elegantly glinting feature wall.
Clairo sweeps around in front of this bold interior decoration with a carefree second-mimosa energy, saying that she and her band are in “such high spirits” and admiring her “crazy” teen and twentysomething audience. Truth be told, this seated crowd, given to carefully filming each song on phones or fashionably ancient digital cameras and sometimes both, isn’t exactly wild. But giddy admiration gushes from them, and there’s a big, fierce singalong for early single Bags, particularly on its clever line about a battle of wits between lovers: “Can you see me using everything to hold back?”
The screams intensify with a top note of disbelief as Clairo introduces Steeeam. It’s the first live airing for this song dating back to her 2020 side project Shelly, but this peppy and pleasant dream-pop feels a bit inconsequential compared with the strong, sophisticated Charm material: having broken through in her teens and charted her whole youth in music, it feels like she is now truly hitting her stride.
Her songs are given extra weight by her terrific band, including multi-instrumentalist Hailey Niswanger. Her flute and saxophone soloing conjure the album’s 70s mood, but it’s such spirited playing – including a positively raucous sax meltdown to close out Partridge – that it never seems like twee nostalgia. With big organ lines and bigger sofa, the band also bring to mind Stereolab and their Space Age Bachelor Pad Music.
The jump in quality between Steeeam and, say, the funkily headstrong Add Up My Love is a mark of how far Clairo has come in a relatively short time, from insular bedroom ditties to this more mature sound, lavish staging, front rows at last week’s Paris fashion week and a kind of tentative extroversion. Even the older material gets swept up in this self-confidence, with the Strokes-y garage rock riff of closing song Sofia ringing out at huge new-wave proportions.
• At Eventim Apollo, 14 March; Glasgow Academy, 16 and 17 March; and Manchester Apollo, 19 and 20 March.
