Emma Pollock

Set just off the massive Avengida Diagonal in a slightly nondescript area of Barcelona, BeCool nevertheless enjoys a fine reputation among the city’s nightspots, not least due to its excellent sound and proclivity for strong line-ups both local and international.

Tonight we get both, local quintet Olivemoon opening with a fine set that swings from ethereal noise and bowed guitars to sweet, textured pop via lovely four-part harmonies and handclaps, all buoyed by Laura Resina’s driving violin. If it does occasionally come off a little too refined, the frenetic marching-band finale is thoroughly convincing, noisy stuff.

Emma Pollock and her band make their entry with rousing performances of ‘If Silence Means That Much to You’ and ‘Hug the Harbour’, the songs’ jagged edges gaining new power in a live setting, Pollock a diminutive, charming front-woman whose honeyed tones offset the spiky arrangements perfectly.

Gamely introducing each and every tune in Spanish (even modifying her thanks as to express her gratitude in Catalán) Pollock’s warm stage presence sits at odds with the stirring emotion summoned in her songs. She also takes the time to apologise for the last time she passed through (“I couldn’t sing”, she ruefully explains), at one point worrying she “might have undone all the good” by asking those in attendance how FC Barcelona were getting on this evening (they drew in the end).

It would be difficult, mind, to undo all the goodwill present in BeCool tonight. The band rattle through the highlights of Pollock’s two solo albums to date, weighing slightly in favour of last year’s superb The Law of Large Numbers, and as the night progresses they only get better and better, more keyed in and more bracing. Left to their own devices, Pollock and multi-instrumentalist Jamie Savage pull off a startling, crowd-silencing rendition of the piano-led ‘House on the Hill’ (a song Pollock co-wrote with Kim Edgar for their group The Burns Unit), while full-band numbers like ‘New Land’, ‘Confessions’ and the tic-tac awesome, blazing electric guitar-punctuated ‘Red Orange Green’ sound simply massive.

In one particularly sweet exchange Pollock fluffs the intro to a song and gently scalds Savage before realising she was at fault, then later discovers her beleaguered band member has been receiving electric shocks from his equipment for most of the evening. Consequently the band play a scaled-down version of ‘I Could Be a Saint’ (“How are you going to break my heart / When you’ve never even made my day?”), before an encore marred by the blowing of her third guitar amp in five days.

It’s a shame, because what should have been a triumphant finish cannot be, through no fault of the performers themselves. Still, spending time with such immaculately crafted songs as these – songs that are soft, sweet, powerful and defiant in turn – in such an intimate setting was never going to be anything less than a treat, and these imperfections weirdly constitute an evening even more special than it promised to be in the first place.