Lorde reigned supreme at the Midland on Friday night
Lorde with Lo-Fang
The Midland, Kansas City
Friday, March 21
On Friday night at the Midland, Ella Yelich-O’Connor – the 17-year-old star the world knows as Lorde – kept her audience banter simple and minimal, except when she was introducing her song “Ribs.” The artist spent a few moments explaining the inspiration for the song: After an epic house party she’d thrown with her sister and her best friend, while all her friends were crashing on the floor and in random corners, Lorde stayed awake.
“Throwing a party felt adult, like we’d escaped into a different world,” she said. “But I couldn’t sleep because the idea of setting foot into a different world scared me. When you do something like that, when you step into a different world, can you ever go back to being a kid?”
This rhetoric came late in Lorde’s 65-minute set. We had seen the enigmatic artist, dressed in a floor-length black skirt and black T-shirt, her long tresses hanging wildly around her face, stalk the stage like a possessed tiger and contort her body into feral dance moves. She thrashed like a demon girl in a horror movie. Lorde owned every moment of her live performance.
It seems a little tired, at this point, to spend time marveling at the youth of Lorde. With her 2013 debut, Pure Heroine, and subsequent Grammy wins, the New Zealand native has proved that she is a far cry from the average teenager. But youth is the dominant theme in Lorde’s music, and she, at least, is eager to establish camaraderie with her audience.
“Is anyone really scared about getting older?” Lorde asked the crowd. “I wrote songs to make myself feel safe, to make myself feel warm. And I know a lot if you here are my age, and some of you have grown up and you’ve been through it and you get it – you get what I’m talking about.”
The sold-out Midland audience eagerly screamed its agreement. For all the teens and tweens in attendance, Lorde was better than a pop icon: She presented herself as a peer. For some audience members in the post-college age bracket, Lorde was a bittersweet reminder of that complicated transition from innocence to innocence lost.
And maybe, for everyone else, Lorde just offered a sick dance beat. With only by a drummer and a keyboardist, Lorde’s set was sonically sparse. The most dominant instrument was, fittingly, her voice – a low sound that rose out of her like something from a netherworld, but which she could effortlessly kick up into a higher register, as in the chorus on “Biting Down.” The bare-minimum stage setup made for a dark spotlight on the drama of Lorde’s moves and songs. On the Son Lux tune “Easy,” she was like a gothic queen, reigning over the sludgy, black trombone notes and Tim Burton-sinister guitar chords.
On a stage like the Midland – and like most of the other theaters on Lorde’s first headlining tour – it seemed to be a missed opportunity not to have a more expansive live set. The tracked backing vocals sound fine on record, but they seemed out of place – poorly planned, even – at the Midland. But then again, Lorde didn’t create any of the songs on Pure Heroine with live backup singers, so maybe there’s something in staying true to the recordings.
These things hardly mattered to the general population on Friday night. By the time Lorde got around to “Royals,” the crowd was feverish, a fanatic mess of squealing youths and tipsy dancers.
“There’s something special about this single and this city,” Lorde said before she began “Royals,” which she wrote after seeing a photograph of Royals retired third baseman George Brett. “You were my inspiration.”
Lorde followed “Royals” with an explosive rendition of “Team,” and as an EDM-worthy light show blared down upon the crowd, Lorde slipped offstage and re-emerged moments later dressed in a metallic gold dress, looking part-Elvish princess, part-Xena on a day off. Confetti was blasted as the song finished – the only hint of excess in the set – and Lorde launched into her final song, “A World Alone.” She sang the final lyrics to the song, a triumphant People are talking, let ’em talk, smiled, and walked offstage.
Leftovers: I couldn’t help laughing at the irony of all the audience members’ hands waving in the air for the “Team” lyrics I’m kind of over getting told to throw my hands up in the air… So there.
Set list:
Glory and Gore
Biting Down
Tennis Court
White Teeth Teens
Buzzcut Season
Swingin’ Party (Replacements cover)
Still Sane
400 Lux
Bravado
Easy
Ribs
Royals
Team
A World Alone
