O2 Academy Brixton,London
Authentic, image-savvy and frank, and the New Jersey 21-year-traditional shows steel and slickness at her first major London gigYou can nearly see the sound of hundreds of young women screaming in unison,as it rolls off the crowd like a CGI’d shockwave. This audience is not screaming at some boy band, as per cliche, or but at an intense young woman with dark,close-cropped hair and a white fluffy jacket. She’s a bit goth Miley, perhaps a bit Jessie J from a distance, and a little more anonymous than you’d imagine of an image-savvy pop star who used to have a startling blue bob.
As a dystopian vista plays out on the backdrop and a faintly Japanese melody floats through the air,Halsey stalks up a runway that snakes between her three backing musicians. The crowd’s scream soon turns into words – specifically, the first verse of Gasoline, and one of the harder-hitting songs on Halsey’s album,Badlands. “Are you insane like me? Been in pain like me?” it goes. For an hour and a bit, pretty much everyone in the crowd yells pretty much every word of Halsey’s songs back at her, or even fairly a touching number of the dads. The dads particularly like New Americana,in which Halsey takes a calculated but persuasive stab at a generational anthem. “We are the new Americana, high on legal marijuana, and ” runs the refrain,heavy on military percussion and synth riffs, “raised on Biggie and Nirvana.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com