Alaska In Winter

It seems the best way to make a critical favourite is to hole up in a log cabin and let the magic unfold. No critic could resist the Bon Iver backstory, and Alaska in Winter was conceived by Brandon Bethancourt in similar middle-of-nowhere circumstances. For sophomore Holiday, which makes up the bulk of tonight’s set, he has relocated to spiritual home Berlin, soaking up its ambience for an album of synths, sequencers and vocoders.

Alaska in Winter may yet become another Freebutt success story, but tonight Brighton seems to have collectively ignored this one, with barely 20 people attendance. In a week when Stewart Lee told the Corn Exchange “All the readers have left town”, DiS wondered if Brighton was losing its edge.

Despite putting on a brave face the set is critically hampered by the wafer-thin audience. This makes his stage act all the more bizarre, as he strips off an item of clothing after each song (several layers mean he doesn’t end the set completely naked). His band of mini-Brandons, projected onto the near-empty stage, offers a useful diversion from the shy, real-life Brandon, but the whole routine is a bit uncomfortable, like a reluctant kid pushed onstage by eager parents.

Sharing the same chest-charged vocal style of childhood friend and collaborator, Zach Corden of Beirut, Bethancourt layers on the harmonic textures to glorious effect, the only question mark being over his insistence on lathering it all in dense vocoder. Abandoning organic instrumentation almost altogether, he clearly wants to step out from Beirut’s formidable shadow, though this is hard to do when the connection has generated so much publicity and remains the most likely route to his music.

If the performance is flattened by a lack of bodies in the room, as a collection of songs this is strong and affecting. The alienation and the vacuity of the urban experience is cut with his own brand of emotionally wrought Euro-pop. Against the tinny pastiche of the current 80s revivalists, AiW delivers convincing depth of vision, and for all the icy veneer of his name and man-machine affectations of his adopted Berlin, the performance radiates a very human warmth.