Camille O'Sullivan: Feel

“Hiv you been cryin’?” a man on the way out asks his burly, bald mate, who replies with a terse “naw,” despite conspicuously puffy eyes. It's nothing to be ashamed of, sir – Camille O’Sullivan has ravishing emotional song down to an art fine enough to make a squint-nosed nightclub bouncer shed a tear.

Eight years a Fringe veteran, the French-Irish vocalist has outgrown her cabaret roots to inhabit a space of her own somewhere between theatrical chanteuse and fully-blown rock singer. An opener of Arcade Fire’s ‘Wake Up’—a new addition to O’Sullivan’s repertoire in Feel—typifies her expanding range: dressed like Little Red Riding Hood, illuminated by a spotlight on a stage decorated with fairy lights, a doll’s house and vintage dresses hanging from the ceiling, she moves through the gears sublimely from breathy coo to lusty wail. “Don’t be scared,” she whispers, “it’s just a song.”

Her three-piece band’s arrangements carve a space for O’Sullivan to inhabit that’s delicately spare and raggedly powerful in all the right places. Though, as her a capella reading of Jacques Brel’s salty ‘Amsterdam’ proves, she can craft raw, dynamic emotion practically out of the ether.

All the baby-ish babbling, cat noises and general I’m-mad-as-a-fish shtick could be disposed with – O’Sullivan’s alluringly unpolished voice alone is perfectly capable of elevating her show far above the mundane. All the coached and preened X Factor starlets combined couldn’t treat Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hurt’, Nick Cave’s ‘(Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For’ or Radiohead’s ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ with this much affecting fragility.