Maria Somerville may be better known to people as the host of the Early Bird Show on NTS every Monday and Tuesday morning, where she plays esoteric, moving selections that kick the day off to just the right start.
Since 2018, Somerville has been releasing music of her own that synthesises the kind of music she plays on her radio show – post-punk, traditional Irish folk, dreampop, ambient and more – into something entirely her own.
Her newest album Luster is a soft, slow build, alternating between ambient and thrumming, insistent not-quite-shoegaze, not-quite-rock, not-quite-folk from track to track. Evading description, there’s no telling how it might translate live. The ICA seems to be the perfect venue for Somerville’s singularity, always attracting a supportive crowd of people actively seeking out the kind of experience they won’t find at other gig venues.
Support on the night is provided by Bristol band Jabu (pronounced ‘jabboo’, in case you too have been going around saying ‘jayboo’ all these years). The crowd fills out steadily as their set progresses, another consistently supportive feature of an ICA crowd who mostly get down early to see what the support has to offer.
Maria Somerville herself emerges onto the stage like some other mk.gee, backlit by bright white stage lights, or a long lost Drake relative. Her vocals seem deliberately down in the mix so that the whole room has to lean forward to tune in. Live, the set tips between heavier shoegazey moments, as with ‘Projections’ or ‘Garden’, and moments of reflection where the room all sways in time with each other, in place but moving in synchronicity. Ending on ‘All My People’ from her 2019 album of the same name, the set built to a close, beating in and out of intensity like light behind your eyelids, swelling and subsiding like waves.
This transience is a key part of Somerville’s music, whether recorded or live; everything she does feels natural, instinctual, so that whether she’s drawing your nearer in a moment of quiet layered guitar or going further outwards with insistent drums and hushed vocals, it feels entirely right.
featured image: Cáit Fahey
