Tell me you’re getting old without telling me you’re getting old: I hate phones at gigs. I cannot understand why anyone would rather miss the experience of a show just to capture something at a relatively average quality that they’re highly unlikely to ever watch again.
That’s why tonight, at the Eventim Apollo, the lack of phone screens obscuring the view and dampening the atmosphere makes it all feel like we’ve entered another realm. A place where music fans are present, just enjoying the moment. It’s fucking amazing.
I didn’t realise this was a thing at Khruangbin shows — and I’m sure it’s been well-covered by now — but the band always requests people refrain from using their handheld pressy-button devices during their live performance. The difference it makes is indescribable. I’m emotional.
The atmosphere created by the stage set — three large, warmly lit windows, and a set of steps, all in a terracotta hue — and the enveloping sound is something that needs to be bathed in. That’s how you experience Khruangbin. You have to embrace the show wholly.
The last time I saw them was a few years ago on a huge outdoor stage at Primavera Sound in Barcelona. The sun added its own thing, and it was a great set. But, this feels different. We’re in Khruangbin’s world here. And it’s warm. And I like it.
They’re more aware than ever of their sound now, and they’re fully invested in immersing us all in it. This venue has a sonic quality that works incredibly well for this band — the melodic swells and the delicate dynamics of their songs are given room to breathe and take on their own life.
The set begins with the band performing their latest release, A La Sala, in its exact running order. Think sunkissed, warm, blissful tones and hues. The record flows wonderfully, and it’s even more effective. Then, after a short, dramatic interval (rainfall included) they return with familiar “older” songs like ‘Zionsville’, ‘August Twelve’, ‘Mr White’,‘Two Fish and an Elephant’, and ‘Dern Kala’.
These tracks are a prime set up for the funky and soulful ‘Evan Finds the Third Room’ — which is like being lured into a trance by the power of groove and musical feeling — and the subsequent, and intricately woven ‘Maria También’. The latter tune has a middle-eastern sound, with guitar tones and style that is shaped by a staccato approach to how the notes are played. This is all enhanced by a very short delay that makes it sound somewhat otherworldly.
I guess I got hung up on these two tracks because they feel deliberate, both in their style and production, and in their placement tonight. I think it’s because there’s something integral to the band in those styles. You can hear their influences pouring out in their riffs, rhythms and melodies here, and I love feeling the band’s identity hitting me right between the eyes.
To wrap up, the band works through a trio of fan favourites — ‘White Gloves’, ‘Time (You and I)’, and ‘People Everywhere (Still Alive) — and it’s safe to say this show felt different. In part, because of the lack of phones and, in turn, the lack of reason to be distracted. By going on the band’s journey, fully, it feels like watching a movie for the second or third time, where you catch more details and recognise the “why” things are done the way they’re done.
So yeah, if that is a sign I’m growing as old as the hills, fine by me. I like hills.
MUSIC PREMIERES
Never let it be said that Lady Gaga doesn’t play three-dimensional chess. She did that, quite literally, in one of a boundless series of production numbers during her Friday night headlining set at Coachella, with a drone camera flying what seemed to be about a thousand feet overhead to catch a Busby Berkeley’s-eye-view shot of the choreography on the giant, checkered game board on the B-stage below, letting Couch-ella viewers see what actual Coachella attendees couldn’t, quite. It was an impressive moment… and, by an hour later in the show, it was hard to even recall, so many show-stopping song-and-dance numbers had happened in the interval. You needed to take notes to keep track of even half of the vividly wacked-out visual setpieces she packed into a 110-minute performance. (Don’t worry, we did.) Maybe the only reason you could still recall the live chess game all that time later in the show was because the final stretch actually did feel like — hey! — a checkmate.
Maybe no one will ever outdo Beyoncé 2018 for sheer dazzle in headlining Coachella sets from beloved divas. But it sure felt like Gaga had spent the last seven years going “Hold my beer” and thinking up ways to make her own mark… or at least make a second mark that was more indelible than the one she left behind in the course of her last Coachella gig of her own in 2017. Only time will tell how this show goes down in the all-time ‘Chella annals, as ranked by millions of judges. But the Little Monsters fan base sure got its money’s worth, with a show that managed — in truest Gaga fashion — to be equal parts bizarro and sentimental. There may have been some dry eyes left in the house by the time she finished sending her love to the teeming masses, but there were no dry insults. Maybe for the first time all day, the comment threads in the comment stream alongside the YouTube livestream was without catty remarks. You could snark about the hilariously unhinged costume choices, if that wasn’t your bag. But singing- and dancing-wise, this was unassailable stuff.
“What’s happening?” she asked at 11:57 p.m., in an interstitial moment of mock-bafflement — and sure, a lot of viewers had been asking that very question since the moment she went on at 11:10. There seemed to be an underlying arc to the narrative of the show, which began with a spoken poem about “the manifesto of Mayhem” and went on to include title cards for Acts I, II, III., IV and V. (Among these were “Of velvet and vice”; “And she fell into a gothic dream”; and “The beautiful nightmare that knows her name,” in case you were not also taking notes.) Anyone who doesn’t think it’s fun to navigate visual confusion might have turned in early for the night, rather than try to make sense of, say, why Gaga’s costuming and design seems to marry soft, giant feathers with thorny wrap-arounds and exoskelton imagery. Or why she was hobbling with a cane for part of the show (echoing the same motif in a recent music video), or putting on a helmet and taking up giant crutches at another point. Sometimes you think you’d figured out what was supposed to be happening, and then something else would throw you for a loop. Take the time Gaga spent in the middle of the show in a large sandbox that seemed to serve as a graveyard, with the undead rising from underneath the sand to menace our white-clad heroine (who seemed to have been executed in that earlier chess match). Ah, zombies! Like “Thriller”? That, we get. But then another person climbed out of the sand in shoulders-to-toes sheer red nylons, and I felt a little bit conceptually lost again.
No matter! These bells and whistles may all have narrative meaning for Gaga and her team, or may just be fun to play with. But in the end, for the rest of us, they’re efficient delivery systems for giving us the old-fashioned grist of show business — that is, world-class belting and hoofing — embedded in odd garnishments that keep things from ever being boring or hokey for a second. Occasionally in this show, one of Gaga’s many looks would resemble something a bit more traditional. Like when she came back out with a black pageboy wig, and a shorter-than-short black jacket, and you might have thought of Sally Bowles even before Gaga was heard in voiceover reciting German in “Scheiße.” Anyway, she always looked as striking as she sounded, which is no small accomplishment on the part of her dressers.
One lingering question among viewers might have been: Was this the unofficial opening of her 2025 tour, which officially starts in Las Vegas on July 16? Some other performers don’t mind doing at Coachella the same thing they do on the road, like Missy Elliott, who preceded Gaga on stage and pretty much did the touring show fans have already seen. For Gaga, though, the answer has to be no, though it hasn’t been stated quite that baldly. After all, she did say, before she ever announced tour dates, that she wanted to do something bespoke for Coachella, which indicated that this performance would not be one long spoiler for the road show to come. The idea that this was essentially a one-off seemed confirmed when she told the crowd: “I wanted to make a romantic gesture to you… I decided to build you an opera house in the dessert.” Ah, so that’s what the back of her massive set was supposed to be. (I had been guessing some kind of combination of motel balconies and Roman ruins.)
But the thing that really cemented that this was not a glimpse of her touring routine? The ramps. Without being on site, it was hard to guess whether the thrusts that took the concert out into the audience at length were really as endless and labyrinthine as they appeared in the camera tracking shots, or whether there was some illusion to that. But boy, it sure seemed like she and her dancers were marching halfway to Idyllwild at various points in the show. Will she be able to bring those seemingly 10,000-foot runways to Madison Square Garden? Likely not. So this was a good chance for Gaga and choreographer Parris Goebel to enjoy the real estate while they had it, with Gage and the dancers not just strutting but actually given interesting bits of business to do in making their way through the field to various stops. Constant, well-trained movement across a large space can be just hella fun — it sure was here.
That dancing can be herky-jerky or rigid, but by the time Gaga got to “Garden of Eden,” she and her team engaged in a funkier style of movement than at other times, and it was delightful. Of course, ’70s and ’80s-style pop-funk plays a big part in her new album, “Mayhem” — there was no mistaking the Michael Jackson-isms of “Shadow of a Man” or the Prince-isms of “Killiah,” highlights both — and so having that reflected in the choreography, here and there, was a kick. This is not the kind of show where people are just gonna go freestyling all of a sudden, but it adds a healthy sense of dynamics to her set when her crew is acting like aliens from the Renaissance era part of the time and like regular human beings at other times.
The biggest difference between Gaga and some of the other performers at Coachella almost goes without saying: live singing. Between the Go-Go’s wonderfully raw performance earlier in the day and Lady Gaga’s set, you could catch a lot of Memorex performances, switching YouTube channels in search of somebody putting a real voice on the line. You could pretty much anticipate that Gaga would not be miming (or at least not often), but it was still a pleasure to hear her lightly panting into the mic now and again, as if we needed proof she was delivering the goods al fresco. It’s old news that she’s one of modern pop’s most gifted vocalists, but it hasn’t really gotten old yet. Not when you can see her do a literal victory lap around the perimeter of the staging era, grabbing fans’ hands and even boosting herself over some of their heads, and not miss a beat.
However bizarrely the show started, it was moony in just about equal measure at the end, as Gaga showed her true colors with earnest songs like “Shallow” and earnest spoken asides to match. (Among those more straightforward songs was “Die With a Smile,” performed at a skull-encased piano, but shortened, as to not to have to take on too much of Bruno Mars’ duet part herself.) Gaga is kind of a softy, for all those literal hard surfaces she builds into some of her outfits. “It’s fucking beautiful out here,” she gushed near the end. “I always feel so blessed to be with the audience because you always teach me something profound. The truth is, we’re all one. It’s just all one fucking thing.” And there was a tender shout-out to her “babe.” Truth be told, the final stretches of sentimentality might’ve been a bit much, if Gaga hadn’t earned the right to get lovey-dovey with us by being such a scary goofball earlier on.
Blessed with a smart sense of dynamics — musical, theatrical, emotional — that extends kind of across the board? She must’ve been born that way. At Coachella, which needed the bar for pure entertainment and talent to be raised this high again, we were good with the cuddles and the claws.
Lady Gaga’s Coachella setlist:
Bloody Mary
Abracadabra
Judas
Scheiße
Garden of Eden
Poker Face
Perfect Celebrity
Disease
Pararazzi
Alejandro
The Beast
Killah (with Gesaffelstein)
Zombieboy
Die With a Smile
How Bad Do U Want Me
Shadow of a Man
Kill for Love
Born This Way
Shallow
Vanish Into You
Bad Romance
