A HEALTHY-SIZED crowd made their way out of the Friday evening rain to The Haunt for an indie-pop session with Brooklyn musician Frankie Cosmos.

Supporting was Ellis Jones’s Trust Fund – he showed up on stage without his usual four-piece band. The scrappy, DIY nature of songs came through more prominently without them but, despite being warm and humorous on stage with a nod to his awkwardness and unpreparedness to playing solo, the performance came across as incompetent and unbending to those unfamiliar with it.

Frankie Cosmos rattled through a 45-minute set with her infectious tunes. The singer is known for her short songs detailing small fragments of experiences but one couldn’t help wanting longer versions live to counteract the start-stop nature of the night.

The spell-binding power of letting a melody grow is rather spoiled by being being cut short. It would have been nice to linger in her songs’ universes for a while longer. However, this wasn’t always the case – School, for instance, built up an affecting melody with backing vocal support from her band. The carefree charm of Frankie Cosmos’s music is always unsettled and juxtaposed with the dark existential questions lurking in her lyrics.

Banality is interwoven with deep affection on songs such as Fool: “I thought we could eat bread, I thought we could talk on darker days with our boots kicked off.” Her words are underpinned by simple yet driving instrumentation. Despite playing the majority of both her albums Next Thing and Zentropy the band also hurtled through quite a large number of unheard new tracks, holding the attention of the audience in unfamiliar territory.

Very much a testament to the compelling tunes Frankie Cosmos creates.