Kate Tempest review – this isn't a gig, it's a reckoning

Leith theatre, Edinburgh
The performance poet absorbs all of the uncertainty and anger of our times, and pours it into ferocious, apocalyptic music that both wounds and heals

Rarely can a room have felt so alive. With her Mercury-nominated mix of spoken word, rap and poetry, Kate Tempest absorbs the agonies of the modern world and pours them into music that both wounds and heals.

The south Londoner kicks off her debut at the Edinburgh international festival with a selection of her best and most commanding work. Framed by a red moon, she starts with the catastrophic Europe Is Lost, from her 2016 apocalyptic, electronic story cycle, Let Them Eat Chaos. “Kill what you find if it threatens you / No trace of love in the hunt for the bigger buck / Here in the land where nobody gives a fuck.” From then on, the ferocity is relentless. When Tempest glides within the same note from speech to song, it is like plummeting down a rollercoaster, your stomach left mid-air.

Related: Kate Tempest: ‘I engage with all of myself, which is why it’s dangerous’