Which is kind of apt in the context of this year's A Different Ship, Luke Temple's account of battling the quicksand malaise of loneliness with musical helium, and losing. Like any combo facing down the cocktail-hour-in-Chernobyl vibe of the early Festival set, the indie Brooklynites play with a mixture of deflation and defiance. Nonetheless, a doomy take on Tragedy's 'Try To Make Yourself A Work Of Art' fares better than the Ekstasis material, with great peals of cello and keyboard gradually escalating in intensity to an extended crescendo. Holter's far from the only underground concern currently channeling the Irish MIDI-surfing sprite, but live the connection is made particularly explicit, leaving her music feeling markedly less distinctive and original than her recorded output. What on record comes across as flighty and delicate, multi-layered composition instead arrives as straightforward singer-songwriter material, recalling, by turns, Joanna Newsom, Ariel Pink, Kate Bush and, rather less vogueishly, Enya. Which would be fine if most of the material from this year's Ekstasis album, which dominates proceedings today, didn't prove to be so deceptively straightforward once shorn of its careful arrangements. But the greater issue - and something that her Oto performance also suffered from - is that in the live area, with muddy sound and only three pairs of hands, it's hard to replicate the complexity and depth of her recorded songs. That's thanks partly to the drums, which are mixed a tad too high and drown out the intricacies of Holter's songwriting. Compared to the delicacy of Holter's performance the night before at Cafe Oto, her show to open the BleeD Stage today is a disappointment.
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