Alexandra Palace, London
The Swedish singer commands the 10,000-strong crowd with a perfectly pitched set ranging from club anthems to her latest heartbreaking classics
Pop thrives on the push and pull of delayed gratification, and the release, when it comes, is overwhelming. This intoxicating sensation runs through the 2018 album Honey, Robyn’s first in eight years. She reshaped the pop landscape with tear- and sweat-stained emo-bangers on her 2010 Body Talk series, influencing everyone from Katy Perry to a raft of fellow Swedes. With Honey, Robyn offered something more languid, the pop highs represented by undulating ripples rather than crashing waves.
Tonight, she makes the 10,000-strong heaving mass wait. In fact, for the first 90 seconds of the gently pulsating Send to Robin Immediately [sic], she isn’t even on stage. She appears only as the beat starts to throb, and even then she stands stock-still as gauzy, white fabric billows around a giant statue of caressing hands. The tension doesn’t snap until the third song, Indestructible, initiated by an expertly timed clap. From that moment on, the crowd are in the palm of her hands, as each song bleeds into the next like an immaculately crafted DJ set aimed at puncturing and then suturing the heart. The coiled frustration of Be Mine, during which Robyn yanks down a sheet that had acted as the final barrier between her and her sweaty disciples, rubs shoulders with the upbeat Ever Again, while the disco-tinged Because It’s in the Music (“and it makes me want to cry”) is healed by the groove-lead balm of Between the Lines.
Related: How Robyn transformed pop
Continue reading...by Michael Cragg via Electronic music | The Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment