If Lord Considered by some as one of pop music’s great mystics, she is also a champion in sensing – or removes her persona and herself. Halfway through her performance at the Chicago stop for her “Ultrasound” world tour, She paused the show and asked for the arena lamps to be lit so she could look at the audience.
“It is you who have made these songs live as they do,” she said, the bright lights acted as an equalization of variety: robbed of its shadow, her face was suddenly just like those in the audience. At that moment, Ella was Yelich-O’Connor, or as close to her real self as her as the presence of the stage would allow. “It has nothing to do with me, that’s all to do with you.”
The audience roared. It was a moment among many of the deconstruction, reconstruction and transformation that characterizes Lorde’s work. The set covered all four albums in her oeuvre – she played “royals”, her breakthrough in 2013 and seemingly a natural encore, others – but focused mainly on Her latest, “Virgin.” She implemented wardrobe changes considering the audience and removed individual clothes under and between songs. She drove down her jeans to reveal black Calvin Klein lingerie and took off her shoes for “current issues”; Before “GRWM” she hoisted up her dark blue shirt and guided inch from a camera and sent her sweaty stomach to the arena on the screen behind her. For “Man of the Year”, without a doubt the show’s climate, the singer applied silver bands to her breasts, sang shirtless with jeans and a silver chain, which embodied the vision she had of herself and her gender identity while creating “Virgin.”
These small -scale outfit changes, combined with a complicated and accurate lighting design that sometimes bathed the arena in blue light, seemed to reveal Lorde’s desire to just, to be so transparent to look through. The cover of “Virgin” has an X -ray of a pelvis with an Iud, a zipper and belt buckle; On the album, Lord sings about worried relationships and intimacy, struggles with body image and becomes “someone more like myself.” Throughout “Virgin” (and really her previous album) is a range – of herself, of space, of experience. But wrapped around that purity is layer – layer that she talked about during the show.
“You want to taste the strange taste of life, you want sweet and angry, bitter,” she told the audience. “You understand that by scaling away the layers there is something very truthful and beautiful to find.”
However, the process of scale these layers can be disoriented, especially in a world where trying to identify the nebulas of self is often interrupted and fragmented by the screen. If “Virgin” is a distilled and compact work, supplemented and improved the concert visually it, shared Lorde and her two gray-clad dancers in frenetic arrangements of image and video boat for entertainment value, safe, but also as a kind of commentary on digital subjectivity. On one occasion, one of the dancers held a camera and microphone in front of Lorde and walked in front of her like a pseudo-parazzo, the general sea of telephone cameras below and also captured every move.
Lorde then broke the fourth wall for his second last song, “David”, a haunting meditation on a previous relationship. Holded in a jacket that seemed to be made of light panels, she pulled down from the stage into the audience, which split to make a way for her.
“Why are we running to the ones we do?” She sang and reached the opposite end of the arena as the song approached her rushing, vibrant finale. “I don’t belong to anyone.”
With that, the lights were closed. Lorde resurrected in a blue sweater, still opposite the stage, a simple beam of light that crosses the arena above her, to play “ribs”, from her first album, “Pure Heroine.” When the song ended, she handed up to the beam and caught it with her hand. In the past seconds, her palm glowed red, and then the light disappeared.
