“Hey! Hey!” Wet’s Kelly Zutrau had been lolling at the back of the stage, immersed in the tiny intricacies of the song Body; now, startlingly, she’s at the front, shouting at a couple of screechers in the front row. “Shut the fuck up or get the fuck out of here!” When they persist, she orders: “Someone take these girls to the back. They’re distracting all these people.”
To Zutrau and her Brooklyn-based bandmates, Marty Sulkow and Joe Valle, loud appreciation is a mood-killer. It’s a minute before the trio (plus tour drummer) are ready to pick up the reins again, and not until the next song do they recover the flow. And this is a show that’s essentially all flow, each slow jam eliding into the next with a nudge of Sulkow’s many guitar pedals. Wet (who aren’t without humour; until “legal issues” forced them to change it, their Twitter name was @kanyewet) get a lot out of a little: playing most of their debut album Don’t You, they create a viable show out of something that’s basically smoke and allusion.
Encased in a travel-crumpled anorak, Zutrau is in a reverie throughout, hazily picking out the lyrics – which stick to romantic boy/girl convention – as Sulkow and Valle recreate the album’s fluttery shimmer on guitar and synthpads. Jessie Ware, the xx and Chvrches come to mind; what Wet lack at this point is their sense of the scraped-raw psyche.
Even so, having made music designed to be heard on headphones, Wet pull it off live. If anything, Don’t Wanna Be Your Girl is much more affecting with Zutrau summoning its country-goth isolation right in front of us; Island devolves into a primal stomp that leaves the trio seemingly wrung out. When they leave the stage, one song later, even the chattering girls restrict themselves to quiet applause, which feels more appropriately Wet.
• At Broadcast, Glasgow, 21 March. Box office: 0141-332 7304. Then touring until 23 March.
