Reviewed by Becky Glass

It starts well: coats draped over rows of vinyl, spotlights on low, and a crowd so benevolent they’re emitting an actual glow. The semi-transformed Oxfam shop on Kingsland Roadis an enchanting venue from the off – relaxed, calm and unpretentious: quite a surprise for mid-town Hipsterville. Add the lively warbling of Kyla La Grange to warm up the crowd and you’ve got a winner.
We had a winner. Emerging quietly confident, murmuring the first notes of her first song, Lucy Rose’s voice washed over the jumble as bewitching, as natural, as warming as sunlight.
The effect is soporific and uplifting at once. It’s a folksy Feist; Laura Marling without grit. And it’s addictive: the melodies and the sound get into your head, as weirdly familiar as your own thoughts.
Appreciative, undemanding and solid, Lucy makes a natural stage presence, unaffected in conversation with the crowd. ‘This guitar is a terrible instrument,’ she says, ‘When I’m rich and famous enough, I’m going to smash it up on stage.’ I don’t believe her; I think she’d recycle it – but the affected shyness, the artful wistfulness that makes other female folkstresses so irritating just isn’t in her at all.
In these respects, she’s a joy to watch. But if there’s one thing Lucy’s music can be faulted on, it’s a lack of passion. There’s just no rough edge to her: her words are expressive, but don’t seem to connect with real emotions. It’s not the troubled, tortured cry we’ve come to expect from a girl and a guitar.
But for Lucy, therein lies her charm. She really seems authentic, truly herself in her music. It’s lovely, it’s honest, and in its insistence to be simple, it’s wonderfully strong.
There isn’t much around at the moment that can have such a hypnotic effect on you – especially live. If just for that, Lucy is worth a watch.
And angst is passé anyway.
http://soundcloud.com/lucy-rose/first-mix-m-02

Young, attractive, intelligent and now a bona fida “Next Big Thing” you could say that things are looking pretty good for Kyla La Grange in 2012. She’s certainly getting her fair share of media attention and there’s a definite sense of excitement to the atmosphere in the upstairs of the Garage. There’s been no shortage of female acts with strong voices mining the treasures of the past 40 years for inspiration and La Grange seems to have found her niche with a slightly countrified-goth-rock sound, earning her comparisons with Florence and Bat for Lashes for her effort.
Coming on stage, face adorned with glitter and looking slight and younger than her 24 years, she launches into early single Been Better with her band. Throughout the set she makes full use of the backing, building the sound or her rock ballads to accompany her vivid, story-telling lyrics. Been Better sets the tone, with its loud-soft-loud dynamic working the crowd. As the surging riff resides and the gentle strum of the verse kicks in, you can’t help but think that her voice has a Dolly Parton-esque quality to it, which is not to say a bad thing – OK she may be from Watford – but she seems genuine and sincere enough with her sound to carry it off…we’re not talking Joss Stone here.  Courage has a choral quality, building into a triumph of a chorus, only slightly let down by the clunky lyrics (“hole in your sole” anyone?). Vampire Smile is a lilting, mid-tempo strum that mellows the pace, before Lambs, a stomping, sing-a-long-for-the-future of a track, builds and grows into a monster that certainly entertains the Florence and the Machine comparisons. Overcoming a broken guitar and some possible nerves, like one of her songs, La Grange certainly grows into the set. She uses her guitar free moments to move around the stage and with one arched-back rock pose, she almost causes the ‘intense’ looking guys at the front drop their perma-recording cameras. Almost. There’s no place for Walk Through Walls, slightly surprisingly, and she finishes the set with ballad ‘Catalyst’ which is a gentle end to the evening.
By no means the finished article and probably in need of a couple more quality numbers to fully captivate, Kyla La Grange is a definite talent that has a unique enough sound to set her apart from the growing list of female singer-songwriters. It’s not hard to imagine that a large proportion of the room were solely here to see her tonight, to settle their own hype-induced curiosity, and it’s probably safe to say that they were not left disappointed.