Hozier’s winning melodies are crying out for a cutting edge
Pop
Hozier
Usher Hall, Edinburgh
★★★ ★★
It is hard to take Hozier’s ragged troubadour pitch too seriously – this is slick radio fodder, aimed at the adult pop market. But live, away from the TV lights and the recording studio, can the Irish singer-songwriter squeeze in enough of the roots music he grew up with to cut the sweetness with something a littler harder?
Not really. Though a patina of folky blues was laid over the songs – some slide guitar here, some neat picking there – they relied on melodies that were winning but anodyne.
To Be Alone dripped with the arrhythmic grandeur of John Lee Hooker, but the chorus was like something that would have been rejected by Arcade Fire as too cheaply anthemic. Down-and-dirty White Stripes-style riffing opened Jackie and
Wilson but the chorus could have crowned a boy-band chart-topper.
Boy bands might dream, though, of the frenzied warmth that greeted Hozier. He may have donned the black cloth of the indie boy, but he carried himself like a natural pop star.
The band only burnished that image. They lent a sheen to music that could have done with some roughing up. This was a pristine, expensivesounding collection of experts that guided Hozier through the shallows of his writing with élan, presenting the music as if behind a perspex case, to be examined and admired but not felt.
Exceptions were rare but powerful. The melody of Arsonist’s Lullaby snaked between the malevolent backing beats with dark glee. The clockwork groove of Work Song was a glorious counterpoint to the ghostly backing harmonies. Hozier came closer here than anywhere else to marrying the rhythms and licks of the blues with the melodic power of pop.
A different treatment might have found new depths in these songs, harnessing Hozier’s fine sense of blues rhythm and folk cadence, but, on this outing, gloss won out over grit.