While she is a relative newcomer to UK audiences as an artist in her own right, St Vincent’s pedigree as a performer has been honed by time as part of the Polyphonic Spree and in Sufjan Stevens’s touring band.

So, she oozed confidence and presence throughout her hour or so at The Slaughtered Lamb, despite feeling moved to turn off the lamp behind her, the only thing illuminating her, and perform in total darkness.

The album she is touring, Marry Me, is an exquisite proposition containing half a dozen genuinely exceptional pop masterpieces, but is defined by all sorts of electric/electronic/synthesised wizardry that would be surely impossible to pull off just on her own with an electric guitar and a bit of live looping. And isn’t there the danger with live looping that the singer basically ends up doing karaoke to their own songs?

Yes, there is. But St Vincent, aka Annie Clark, was able to manipulate the construction of her songs in a direction away from her album, something most startling on ‘Your Lips Are Red’, with electric guitar so fierce as to provoke comparisons with PJ Harvey. The diabolical urgency of ‘Paris Is Burning’ was terrifying in the extreme, Clark using two microphones to create a strange dialogue with herself during this debauched take on Broadway tunes.

‘Jesus Saves, I Spend’, possibly her finest song, was the only number that veered towards being overly faithful to its studio rendering, but as with other tracks tonight, any (very unlikely) distraction on the audience’s part was pummelled away by the ferocity, not to mention considerable technical skill, of the 24-year-old’s guitar playing.

In equal parts reminiscent of Lisa Germano, Juana Molina and Andrew Bird, St Vincent is exactly what the evolution of popular music should be yielding in 2007.

Barnaby Smith