Tahliah Barnett, the artist known as FKA twigs, got her start as a dancer, twisting and turning as music video scenery. But if her subsequent, fast-evolving career as a musician, and specifically the strength of her skeletal yet utterly entrancing debut “LP1,” has moved the British singer firmly toward the foreground, Barnett’s background as a dancer has hardly been left behind.
FKA twigs started her set at the Metro Thursday night backlit, in silhouette, contorting herself with a captivating vulnerability. She swayed, she jerked, she twitched, she crouched. She fell to the ground, simultaneously wounded yet strong. Not a lot of the prosaically-titled “LP1,” whose songs dominated the set, is particularly well suited to the dance floor, but as Barnett contorted to its extraterrestrial rhythms, surrounded by a trio of digital wizards pushed back even farther in the shadows, she showed as always that a good dancer can move to anything.
The music of “LP1” is moving in a different, harder to pinpoint way. It operates somewhere in the hazy margins of R&B, its twitchy beats, glitchy electronics and half-whispered lyrics drifting in and out of focus like an erotically charged daydream. Yet it’s the album’s striking empty spaces and brave silences that prove as important as its minimalist melodies, if not more so, and often it took the expressive form of Barnett herself to amplify songs such as “Pendulum” or “Numbers,” tracks whose quietly forceful lyrics were otherwise occasionally lost in the low-end soundscapes. Songs such as “Video Girl” and “Two Weeks” similarly offered disarmingly self-assured sentiments, shaped by sex but tempered by isolation, and knowingly or not Barnett compensated for her buried vocals by contorting her body into striking punctuation marks.
Equally striking was the contrast between Barnett’s superstar confidence and the inherent sonic challenges of her songs, which led to an intriguing contradiction. On one hand, you wanted to lose yourself in the strange soundscapes of FKA twigs, to nod and bob along to its foggy yet deceptively discordant racket. Yet you couldn’t take your eyes off of Barnett, who one suspects could have been just as compelling choreographed to a soundtrack of stark silence. For all the discipline of her performance, though, the oddly shy Barnett seemed genuinely grateful and gracious the few times she addressed the sold-out crowd, as if surprised herself at the power she’s tapped into, and almost embarrassed by the prospect of being so good, so soon.
Given her progress so far, that feeling will surely pass. If anything, Barnett’s performance felt less like a coming out and more like a dramatic statement of purpose, a baseline that promises more great things to come.