REVIEW: Daughter at the Sinclair

On Saturday night, rising British indie pop stars Daughter brought their three-piece hushed act to the Sinclair in Cambridge.

Daughter began as the solo project of lead singer Elena Tonra and later grew to include guitarist Igor Haefeli and drummer Remi Aguilella. After garnering critical acclaim in the London indie scene, Daughter signed to UK label 4AD and released their debut LP, If You Leave, earlier this spring.

The album calls to mind Cat Power’s Moon Pix or The xx in its hushed reverence and wispy verses on heartbreak and loss — but (at least for me), a little too much so. Don’t get me wrong, Daughter is a solid band; they write beautiful, instrumentally minimalist but emotionally saturated songs, but their sound didn’t stand out enough to hold my attention. In fact, throughout most of the show, I wished I were seeing The xx or Cat Power again, not their lesser photocopy.

But I guess I’m a tough audience. Typically, I don’t enjoy seeing quiet folk or indie acts whose songs taxi down the runway but never quite make it to liftoff, much as those same songs tend to make up my various sad playlists on iTunes. Music like Daughter is music for reflection, for quiet contemplation, for your headphones when you’re walking home at night and it starts to snow. It’s hard to capture that same intimacy and that emotion in a live setting, because songs like that rest so personally upon us. It almost feels wrong to stand in a room full of people while watching acts like Daughter — albeit a dead silent and unmoving room full of people — because it feels too public, too exposed, too out-of-place for a Saturday night outing.

So will I listen to more Daughter? Probably. I’d like to see where they go from here, and I really enjoyed their cover mashup of Bon Iver’s “Perth” and Hot Chip’s “Ready for the Floor.” But do I have the desire to ever see them live again? Definitely not. They have headphone potential, but when it comes down to it and you’re left with just the aftermath of your emotions when you leave the venue, they’re no Cat Power, and I can’t say they ever will be.