Today's charts give the distinct, dismal impression that a pretty face is all anyone needs to become a pop star. Shivaree provide reassuring proof to the contrary. Frontwoman Ambrosia Parsley has a model's figure, a film star's features, and the cute, coy demeanour of a professional flirt. And yet this gig to promote their second album, Rough Dreams, finds the band performing in a tiny venue in west London that is barely two-thirds full.
Parsley's trouble is that, looks aside, she doesn't conform to pop-star stereotypes; nor can her band's music be easily pigeonholed. At its least interesting, Shivaree's combination of sugary vocals and industrial grind merely recalls Garbage or Stina Nordenstam; at its most alluring and intriguing, however, it sounds as if jazz standards, Latin dance, post-rock and Tom Waits have been simultaneously chucked in a blender: out churns a music that is twisted, seductive and strange.
On stage, the band - Danny McGough (keyboards) and Duke McVinnie (guitar) - become a five-piece who, slinking and clattering, make the songs sound far more atmospheric than on record. Bossa Nova transports us to a sawdust-strewn bar in deepest Texas, I Don't Care to the New York cabaret circuit. For the sinuous Valentine's Day song John, 2/14, the quintet conjure up a warped tango, the piano taking bold masculine strides while a guitar executes flamboyant, feminine twirls. They follow the bullish rock of Thundercats with a slow, oozy cover of Great Balls of Fire. Driven by clanging guitar and Parsley's pelvic thrusts, it is positively filthy: Jerry Lee Lewis would undoubtedly have approved.
But the show's excitement proves intermittent, as the band repeatedly succumb to the obvious. Foursquare drumbeats remove the kinks from Gone Too Far, while upbeat guitar melodies disinfect the potentially Lynchian Ten Minutes. It all comes down to Shivaree's refusal to settle into a groove: a laudable impulse, but one that is playing havoc with their ability to attract an audience. At present they are too odd for the mainstream, but too straight to earn cult kudos. As they stomp through the mysteriously drawling, Waitsian Flycatcher, you wish they would take another leaf from Waits's book and just go all-out weird.
