Gig review: Lorde at O2 Academy Leeds
“I think this is my first show in Leeds?” Ella Yelich-O’Connor – also known as Lorde – asks the 2,000-strong crowd crammed into the city’s O2 Academy. Her voice – husky in her New Zealander twang – drops another half-octave in playful fashion as she waves at them, in the palm of her hand for this theoretically pared-back European tour kick-off. “I can tell that you dressed up for me.”
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Hide AdThere is something incongruous about one of pop’s most idiosyncratic singer-songwriters in a venue of this magnitude, but it is by design. This opening night may be the smallest on her itinerary, but whether she is an arena-ready prospect on a commercial level is moot – the choice to tackle more intimate settings is a conscious choice intended to lend itself favourably to the record she arrives behind, last year’s self-proclaimed “weed album” Solar Power. Draped in psych-folk vibes, its reinvention of Yelich-O’Connor’s musical wheel proved mutedly divisive.
Here, and amid a choregraphed three-act stage show of chillout theatricality, it ebbs and flows to ultimately charm. On a stage dominated by a rotating ladder superstructure crossed between sundial silhouette and Rapunzel-esque tower inversion, and backed by a mustard-suited band, there is little need to win over fans before first-night nerves take hold; the screams that follow opener Leader of a New Regime for Homemade Dynamite are ear-shattering.
Much of that success is rooted in the performer herself, still disarmingly adjusted a decade on from teenage breakout Pure Heroine. Part of Lorde’s pull is her earthbound charm, even if there is something a little more rehearsed these days – but there’s always a burst of spontaneity just around the corner, from the excited gestures she makes on Stoned at the Nail Salon or fretting about her deodorant after Hard Feelings.
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Hide AdSuch assurance helps prop up woozier new material, handily supplanted by a bumper crop from superb sophomore work Melodrama, like the euphoric Supercut. With an audience primed for soaring singalongs on even the unlikeliest of new songs – California inspires as much fervour as Ribs – it is easy to forgive though, especially in a final half-hour powered by big hitters like Green Light and Tennis Court, the latter handed a first airing in almost four years.
Royals naturally closes out proceedings in an upswell of giddy infectiousness, Yelich-O’Connor’s grin reaching all the way to the back. It might be the last time she gets so close and personal.
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