Robyn
XOYO, London
03/11/2010

It’s not every chart-topper who’ll walk into their own set through a crowd this compact, but, then again, Robyn has never really been as other songstrels. It’s not just the fact that she’s making ultra-commercial music every bit as sophisticated as what’s emerging from the underground (after all, everyone from Gaga to Girls Aloud‘s done plenty of that in recent years). No, her real genius lies in her repeated acknowledgement that, for far more people than most club-friendly music seems to appreciate, the dancefloor can all too often be a place where you go and stand on your own, which, as we know, leads to leaving on your own, going home, crying and wanting to die. Consequently, she’s impeccably placed to deliver a barrage of lachrymose yet life-affirming electro bangers with the minxy vim of a young Poly Styrene and a knack for knuckle-whitening profanity.

And, despite the staggering versatility of this year’s overly-abundant ‘Body Talk’ trilogy, it’s the more electronic end of her oeuvre that gets an airing here, possibly because of its atmospheric consistency or maybe just, while there’s nothing at all wrong with her more acoustic diversions, her trawls through techno at its most technicolor are unfailingly magical. So the craftily crafted double-edged sword of ‘Fembot’ and Royksopp collaboration ‘The Girl And The Robot’ gets wielded with a knowingly winning flick between insouciance and intimacy, ‘Dancing On My Own’ – a clear contender for one of 2010′s best top tenners and a breathlessly colossal audience favourite to boot – luxuriates in an unusually and paradoxically panoramic jubilance, and a less-inevitable-than-you-might-think extended ‘With Every Heartbeat’, introduced as a glorious farewell, still provides the same hauntedly off-kilter thrills it always did, if not moreso.

Already very much a one-off in the pop pantheon, this kind of showing in the most recklessly reduced of circumstances marks Robyn out as entirely a girl wonder, and she’s as wholly dynamic as that’d suggest.

Iain Moffat