Solange - Losing You (live at London's XOYO)

So, it turns out that watching Solange’s live set is one of the funnest ways you could spend an hour in 2013. All loud prints, technical flourishes and tight dance moves that pay homage to a bygone era, she’s a colourful burst on a scene riddled with cynicism, and a performer worth getting excited about.

When hype for anything gets as big as the murmurs that preceded ‘Lange’s London appearance last night, the positivity can almost teeter on the cusp of a looming ominous feeling – something that’s touted to be so good, you think, surely can’t be. That’s how it felt listening to Kindness’s DJ set in XOYO (all the best R&B jams, of course), but it’s a feeling that dissipated once the singer took to the stage. She’s fresh (in a retro-funky kind of way), she’s funny (“if any of y’all have some pot, now would be the right time to light it up”), and she’s got the voice, the charisma and the tasteful approach that mark her out as someone doing something that feels, entertainingly and stylistically, very classic as well as very now.

Dev Hynes, AKA Blood Orange, who glides between vocals, production, guitar and bass to make the set as gleamingly smooth as the ‘True’ EP, was a clear highlight, and as you can see from around the 3.40 mark in the video above, he turned in more than a few slick dance moves himself.

The footage above is very lo-fi, captured on my phone, but you get the idea: Solange slays it. You might notice the camera get a bit more shaky around the point where she tells the audience “I want you to go apeshit in this bitch” – because, well, you know.

If one track isn’t enough, another lovely crowd-member also caught this footage of Solange’s rendition of Look Good With Trouble in the same performance, which you can watch here. Solange will play XOYO again tonight, and will next be in the UK in May, when she’s performing exclusively at Field Day.

Terrible Records released the ‘True’ EP on 27th November 2012.