Marika Hackman comes with the credibility-impairing baggage of having attended Bedales, the public school, and modelled briefly for Burberry, but it’s likely that the doors this opened would have admitted her anyway. The Hampshire-born 23-year-old has emerged seemingly fully formed – a velvet-voiced singer-songwriter whose taste for the macabre floods her delicate acoustic tunes with images of mouldering gore. Her live show adds a ray of light in the form of jokey introductions, but we’re in no danger of going home with a spring in the step after being immersed in songs such as Monday Afternoon, in which the protagonist dies in a wood, leaving only “the sickly sweet of my rotting skin”. This is the kind of thing that belies the initial comparisons to Laura Marling.
Hackman introduces Monday Afternoon as “a little love story”. That’s what many of tonight’s tunes are, in the sense that passion is the driving force. In her hands that momentum mutates into something grisly, though, creating the dissonance that pushes this show along. A fine-boned woman playing finger-picked guitar, Hackman is the picture of a wispy English folkie, but she’s singing: “Suffocate in your smoke, die stuffing my lungs with their fill.”
It can feel like nosing through the blog of a particularly dramatic teen goth, but Hackman’s languorous delivery is seductive, her purity of tone recalling the young Marianne Faithfull. Yet she’s battling murky acoustics that turn half the lyrics into porridge. Ophelia, from debut album We Slept at Last, is only identifiable by its country-blues twanginess, and Next Year is a smog of swampy blues chords. Backed by cello and violin, Hackman sails on. There are no gear changes, few peaks or troughs – she needs to think about changing that as she works through her first headlining tour – but the potential is great.
• At Think Tank, Newcastle, on 2 April. Box office: 0871 220 0260. Then touring.
