Eilish triumphs at Coachella

This news has been read 6832 times!

H.E.R. performs at the Coachella Music & Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club on April 14 in Indio, Calif. (AP)

Grande brings 4/5ths of ‘N Sync

As rumored, Arianna Grande brought out most of the members of ‘N Sync during her Coachella-closing performance Sunday night … and the reaction to the collaboration between the reigning pop superstar and the nearly reunited boy-band kings was mixed, ranging from an exultant “OMG!” to something more like “Oh, meh, god”.

Lance Bass, Joey Fatone, Chris Kirkpatrick and JC Chasez first came out as Grande sang “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored”, which samples the group’s vintage “Makes Me Ill”, and then they stuck around for a joint version of the oldie “Tearin’ Up My Heart”.

The absence of Justin Timberlake was an insurmountable obstacle for some watching at home via the live stream or in the California crowd. Others thought that recreating some of their signature late ‘90s/early 2000s dance moves with Grande gamely joining in was justification enough to spotlight these four in the desert, even without participation from the man in the woods.

At least a small amount of ire was directed at Timberlake for (presumably) saying no and spoiling the potential fun. “JT is no longer touring and couldn’t join N’sync and Ariana for 3 mins at Coachella?” tweeted Erica Beth (@RibaDiva). Wrote Amber (@Yachtzee27), “I read that JT wouldn’t be at Coachella because he’s on tour, but he just finished the tour. So why not just say it’s because he thinks he’s better than ‘N Sync these days?”

Rock isn’t dead at Coachella, a vast amount of evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. It was alive and well in a performance by Billie Eilish that pushed every rock ‘n’ roll button except the one that demands there be an electric guitar on stage.

Close

The 17-going-on-35-year-old star literally bounded through close to half the songs, her white high-top sneakers catching enough air to nearly batter her rear end… then, kicking it down just as many notches when it came time to take to a stool and go all confessional, in another fine rock tradition. It turns out one of the best ways that she is old before her time is that, in spirit if not exactly sound, she comes off as the reincarnation of an old-school punk-rock kid.

Eilish’s non-headlining but really effectively headlining performance was the most anticipated performance of the three-day weekend at the Southern California desert’s conjoined polo clubs. Eilish was booked onto what everybody knows as the second stage – the Outdoor Theatre – and the crush to get into the available space was serious nowhere more than the fenced-off guest/artists area, where even model-actresses used to maintaining their personal space got perhaps their glimpse of what it’s like to be in the thick of it at a Palladium show. It might’ve seemed like an error on Coachella’s part not to book Eilish onto the main stage, but in the end it felt right, like a nascent star’s last club show before acceding to big-league status, even if the “club” here probably allowed for six-figure attendance.

Your initial inclination might also have been to say, “Poor Tame Impala”, since that one-man band, Saturday’s ostensible headliner, was always destined to go as less of an attention-getter for the day – even before a half-hour-late start time for Eilish’s show meant she overlapped their time on the main stage by at least that long. But in the end, maybe Kevin Parker doesn’t need our sympathy. He and his pickup crew did just fine for themselves, and Tame Impala’s show ended up being a very chill-out way to end the day (at least for those who didn’t end it by then heading over to Kid Cudi’s higher-energy, overpacked midnight performance in the Sahara tent).

Tame Impala is tamer these days – and that’s not a knock. They may be known to a lot of the vast crowd as that band that has that one harder-edged hit that they’re never quite if it was by the Black Keys are not. (RTRS)

but what Parker and his falsetto are literally up to lately is something a little closer to that brief period when late-period R.E.M. was trying to sound like Brian Wilson at his mellowest. Parker, a guy who knows how to pace himself, put his most high-energy songs in the middle of the set, and then let the show end on a prettier and more contemplative note that was a very effective antidote for the peaceful end of a burnout-inducing day, letting Coachella day 2 ride into the sunset about four hours after sunset.

Tame Impala is a primary example of a phenomenon being seen in and out of Coachella: how rock bands (or in this case, solo acts operating in the guise of a rock band) are reinventing themselves for a post-rock era, or desperately trying to. You could see it recently in Muse (not at Coachella) going for a more electronic sound, and it was definitely evident in how one of Friday’s main-stage acts, the 1975, has gone all but guitar-less in the thrust of their latest material. Tame Impala has just released a couple of new songs, which indicate that the forthcoming album will not exactly be full of bangers, but will deliver some goods nonetheless. It feels like Parker is actually figuring out a place for himself in a slightly more ambient landscape somewhere between the rock of yore and going cravenly pop – a place that glides smoothly into a space that doesn’t sound too foreign to either of those possible audiences. (RTRS)

By Chris Willman

This news has been read 6832 times!

Back to top button

Advt Blocker Detected

Kindly disable the Ad blocker

Verified by MonsterInsights