★★★★

“This music is almost beyond my capacity to digest,” one crowd member at Julia Holter’s Brighton gig was overheard saying. You could understand where he was coming from, to an extent – the Californian singer-songwriter makes music that is dense with ideas, her unorthodox time signatures making for jittery songs that can be difficult to pin down on first listen.

This is not to deny Holter’s ear for melody; while she rarely adopts traditional song structures, the choruses she does have in her locker are undeniably rousing. Set closer Sea Calls Me Home, from new critically-acclaimed album Have You in My Wilderness, possesses an offbeat melody that could not be called immediately tuneful but nonetheless lingers in the memory.

The same could be said for In The Same Room, the tone of which veers from impish to eerie. The term “ambient” is often used in a lamentably generic way to describe musicians of Holter’s idiosyncrasy, but there can be no doubt she created an immersive and enchanting atmosphere at the Concorde 2.

An easygoing presence on stage, Holter introduced The Falling Age, from her 2011 electronic-based album Tragedy, by drawling: “this is a song from a time when everything was baaaad...now everything is so gooood.” Drawing laughs from the crowd, the line seemed to poke self-knowing fun at singer-songwriters mining their “emotional depths” for the sake of their art.

Backed by strings, Holter’s mastery of the piano allowed her to spin sprawling and complex ditties including new songs Feel You and Lucette Stranded on the Island. Her lyrics may deal in ambiguous themes, but there was nothing uncertain about her Brighton performance or the crowd’s warm reaction.