LIVE REVIEW: Julia Holter @ The Button Factory

Julia Holter stood at her keyboard cooing sad, sweet nothings. Her phrasing at moments carried echoes of Bjork and Joanna Newsom, whose turbo-charged quirkiness the New Yorker has referenced and built on since her emergence on the Los Angeles alternative scene circa 2010.
But the hammer and tongs intensity she brought to a sold-out Button Factory was unmistakably her own as she woozily negotiated tracks from last year's break-out LP, Have You In My Wilderness (a top ten finisher in more than a few end of year 'best ofs'). 
The going, it is true, was occasionally choppy.  In her between song banter Holter seemed to inhabit the persona of disembodied pop pixie a little too enthusiastically so that her whimsicality passed into the realm of acquired taste. Yet she was worth putting up with as she plunged into the curious and murky currents of  'City Appearing' and 'Horns Surrounding Me', creepy, half-chanted highlights from 2013's Loud City Song. 
Arranged around the imposing 31-year-old were string players and guitarists, whose burbling endeavours echoed Holter's disembodied singing. Conventional compositional structure was quickly abandoned, as Holter flitted between minimalist fugues and declamatory dirges that had the urgent aspect of vintage show-tunes. Especially striking was a wind-tossed cover of Dionne Warwick's 'Don't Make Me Over'.
How strange and baffling – and truly, madly fantastical.