Mitski Live
Right after headlining Pitchfork Festival, they came to Boston. It feels like the nineties I longed for, but never got — musically speaking. The closest was early dark-hair Shakira, local alternative bands with the one-front girl, and maybe a short-lived Riot Grrl movement. I had learned about a couple of songs through algorithms and perused a couple of her albums. No expert whatsoever.
Yet, not too long ago, I had the marvelous chance to attend a live performance. What a show it was. For a second there in life, I had forgotten the magic residual propulsion that one great concert leaves me with — hopefully not just me. It took me this long to process the brilliance in their musicianship.
Women music makers are presenting us with intricate narratives that savor different corners of the human experience and reverberate in tune with a wide range of emotional tones.
It seems important to take a minute there.
Performing is exactly what Mitski offered. A flowy layered silver green satin dress, knee pads, and barefooted. Elements that allowed for a depiction of a multitude of climates from anguish to tenderness, rage, vulnerability, instability, inner strength, and many more. Firm hand movements that resembled those of a warrior establishing boundaries through motions. Kicking up in the air just like any major rock icon, taking up right and left space. Taking up space.
A curation of body language that encompassed more than step-to-step choreography; it was an interpretation and in tune to every drum beat, every silence, every erosion of highly synthesized ear-bending sound. A narrative highly manipulated through fierce lighting helped recreate our most terrifying to our most sweet ambiance. Abrupt changes and relentless switching of angles and intensity of greens, reds, blues, yellows, and purples.
The engagement with the audience was kept intimate. I don’t believe that great amounts of talking necessarily amount to being more engaged. The transitions between songs didn’t include much introduction or verbal interaction with the public. On the other hand, most of it was left to the body language that either made the audience sing, scream, jump, dance, or light up their phones. A succinct thankful remark by the end of the show sufficed for the crowd to drown the acoustics with chants of appreciation, love, and joy.
Personally, the craftmanship of composition is most compelling. Strident and synthesized strumming accompanies heavily loaded lines that feel like a punch in the guts for their accuracy to capture a mood, a vibe, a state — a uniquely contemporary one. That is one element in common with so many other indie women songwritters. True priestess poets of our time.
