It’s like you can lean into the pounding bass and crackling synthesizers, there’s so much punch behind the sound of Lorde’s four-piece band. All songs from her electropop album Virgin come by. Hits are stacked like climaxes. Good choice to leave the drummer at home and color the rhythms with buttons, cables and plugs. It keeps the sound open despite all the electronic violence to hear details such as a single guitar precisely through it. When Lorde walks through the audience or builds harmonies cross-legged solo with some distorters, her voice also proves to be enough to fill the room. Lorde finds it difficult to place in the often conservative pop world. She made her breakthrough at the age of sixteen with the world hit ‘Royals’, and then chose her own path. She regularly disappears from the radar for years, only to reappear with new music that is slightly off-kilter. She stops the best melody just before a chorus, unexpectedly comes up with a floaty album or a euphoric single that just doesn’t come to fruition. And this year, to the shock of some stale types, a painfully honest album with a lot of sex and a cover where an X-ray shows her IUD. These are all choices that make it logical that she received exactly zero Grammy nominations last week. At the same time, the same reasons make her so incredibly popular that it is almost impossible to get a ticket for her two Amsterdam shows.
Boxer shorts
It is striking how the entire evening consists of a series of undisguised theatrical choices. Instead of a costume change, at one point Lorde simply takes off her pants and sings a few songs while dancing wildly in her boxers. The tattered jeans remain crumpled until she puts them back on later.
The same applies to the visual direction. Nowadays concerts are filmed from all sides. Shots from above, below or behind the stage, even from the dressing room. An unwritten rule stands out here, because Lorde breaks it: never emphasize how big and empty a stage actually is in a pop show. Apart from all the visual tricks with quickly cut camera angles, precise laser patterns and shape-changing split screens, this is perhaps what stands out most in the direction tonight: time and again the camera seems to be wandering across an empty floor in search of the New Zealand singer. Sometimes she sits exactly where some cross tape indicates. Other times she lies at the end of the catwalk. In a fetal position. Pretty singing a little song with her cheek on the edge. Sometimes her dancer’s camcorder captures her sweaty belly in a close-up during the sultry ‘GRWM’, she hides in one of enormous hollow speakers in the middle of the stage or she runs her lungs out on a treadmill in an unforgettable version of ‘Supercut’. It is all depicted on a large scale. Yet it is as if Lorde, in the great craziness of her pop star existence, also creates her own place for herself live again and again. With a few thousand frenzied fans around her, that is.
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