Gig review: Tara Clerkin Trio at The Attic, Leeds

It’s fair to assume that many would have been double-checking this year’s Mercury Music Prize nominations to confirm an unexpected omission: Somewhere Good by Bristol-rooted Tara Clerkin Trio.

A culmination of the campaign to bridge the gap between untamed experimental instincts and genuinely engaging songwriting the trio has launched on their debut LP and two subsequent EPs, Somewhere Good proved it remains possible to craft genuinely uncategorisable sounds which elude clear points of comparison.

Built on a process of the trio looping and sampling themselves and then twisting the ensuing sounds to otherworldly shapes, it can’t be the easiest of records to recreate live. However, the trio make a virtue of the self-imposed limitations of their live set-up – with the three musicians switching instruments and triggering loops at a rate that contrasts with their dreamily drifting default pacing – tonight at the absolutely rammed, sold-out Attic.

The band are named in the matter-of-fact fashion of a classic jazz trio. However, tonight’s enthusiastically received 75-minute set doesn’t exactly place Tara Clerkin (on nylon stringed guitar, vocals, clarinet and loop management) in the spotlight as the lead instrumentalist. If anything, Clerkin appears to be mainly concerned with balancing the tonal extremes of the trio’s musical arsenal emerging from the opposite sides of the stage: the elementally rigorous, rock-solid beats carved out by drummer Sunny Joe Paradisos (who also multitasks as a cellist and guitarist and shares the vocals with Clerkin on Slow Island, a downcast pop gem with hints of The XX’s nocturnal melancholy) and the delicately phrased, stunningly lyrical jazz piano excursions courtesy of Patrick Benjamin, who also pitches in on melodica and various electric keyboards.

There is an appealingly low-key, occasionally ramshackle vibe to tonight’s proceedings that belies the critical plaudits and sudden increase in profile the trio has enjoyed this year. At one point, Clerkin cracks up the rest of the band by accidentally firing up the trio’s entire loop catalogue in search of the cue for the next entry on the setlist, whilst the cartoonishly hyperactive, giddy day-glo bombardment of Movin’ On seems tailormade to cancel any whiff of serious muso self-regard.

Paradisos launches set-opener Lazy Daisy (the song’s trip hop-hued smoky canter disguising the depths of the trouble lurking within the lyrics) with a homespun take on beat-boxing, the tune gradually building from the skeletal minimalism of a few strummed guitar chords and mouth-made percussion to a bittersweet odd-pop gem.

It’s seriously engaging stuff, but it turns out the trio are only limbering up. It’s difficult to land at suitably versatile shorthand to summarise the band’s pop-jazz-dub-funk-trip hop mash-up, but a pattern of sorts does gradually emerge, with tunes gradually blooming from subtly abstracted sketchiness to stretched-out extemporisations fuelled by robustly off-kilter funkiness, a process that effortlessly eliminates the seemingly unbridgeable divide between uncompromisingly out-there experimentation and sweaty physical danceability.