Julia Holter

In The Same Room

Pristine live revue of Los Angeleno auteur’s oeuvre.

Domino’s new series of “live studio recordings” aims to chronicle their artists’ “everevolving arrangements”, though Julia Holter hardly gives her modernist chamberpop a radical gabba-techno refit for this first Document. Cut at London’s RAK Studios the day after their appearance at last summer’s Green Man festival, Holter and her spare group – drums, viola and bass accompanying her piano – faithfully essay highlights from her four-album songbook, rarely veering from the studio versions’ blueprints. But if the performance is hardly revelatory, it still charms; Lucette Stranded On The Island is all the more affecting for its sparer arrangement, the warm piano of Silhouette played to the fore as Holter lucidly dream-walks through its Arthur Russell-esque soundscape, the torch-song ache of How Long haunting its foreboding, cinematic symphonics. A perfect starting place for Holter neophytes, In The Same Room doesn’t really add much to her extant discography. Stevie Chick