Live: Ja Ja Ja. Karin Park, The Lexington.

Praise be to all things holy that we've Rich Thane, of course for offering up The Line Of Best Fit but primarily for establishing Ja Ja Ja, a club night established in order to extravagantly celebrate the best ear candy Scandinavia and its neighbouring isles and distant outreaches have to unleash upon the unsuspecting clientele of North London. As such, certain cries of rejoice should also be reserved for all things both musical and Nordic of which tonight, at The Lexington, we're treated to three: much has rightly been made of Copenhagen headliners Battlekat, while the congregation make much ado about nothing prior to their grittily glorious show, nothing in this particular instance being Swedish 'rock duo' Johnossi. They're the seemed reason for the night selling out on its return to the Pentonville Road haunt, and the reason a bedraggled-looking Carl Dalemo is seen stumbling about with a bottle of Sagres caught in every interdigital web. Yet for the few to have crammed into the venue's seductive, quite provocative upstairs setting early, the disconcertion generated by Djura's Karin Park is a wonder.

If she once revelled in late-'90s gluey pop stylings, she's now cascading forever deeper into an abyss of what resembles a dank and gloomy misanthropy from an external perspective, and it suits her down to her spindly bones. She snarls "she's like nothing you've seen before" mere minutes in, and indeed concealed in leather and latex, stomping and thundering about on metal-rimmed platforms, she's quite the inimitable character. Having previously fiddled with throwaway pop (Superworldunknown) and Datarock-infused, thunderous electropop (the Fredrik Saroea-featuring Ashes To Gold), her radical progression more or less prohibits her from picking and mixing much from the back catalogue, although the general unfamiliarity with her setlist, paired with a largely apathetic crowd reaction, enhances Park's performance, her hostile, glacial eyes glaring into those of miscellaneous members of the audience as if extracting body heat, the soul, and everything in-between.

Beneath a slicked back quiff that calls to mind that of local hero Robin van Persie, she frantically programmes her MacBook, dishes out the odd synth hook from an analogue Korg that's on its last legs (or knobs), and flings bursts of staccato from a plastic gem-encrusted keytar, the vague whiff of androgyny and her chameleonic, if varying abilities unsettling further. The likes of Ashes and Can't Stop Now are reeled off with a do-or-die urgency, as Park jitters in movement that's equal parts malfunctioning android and wriggling newborn, and is backed solely by brother David on drums. Grimacing from behind blonde locks he vaguely resembles an adult entertainer, and gives Karin a rudimentary, seemingly almost impromptu drum lesson around the midpoint. Intriguingly however, her latest work to have seen the light of day, the Tiger Dreams EP (produced by superstar Swede Christoffer Berg), is shunted into the shade, and as such the Dreijer Andersson parallels that are all but inescapable on record are repressed in favour of macabre, quite kitschy Human League-like composition.

It's unapologetically rough and ready, scrappy (several notes and accents are slightly off) and downright disturbing. However given her blockbusting voice and twisted sex appeal, Karin Park's live showing is in many ways superlative, and with lyrics like "I've been playing cards with a shit hand / And I tell stories like an old man", there's alluring madness to the contorted method of it all. From the darkest shadows a bright light comes forth.