Concert review: Billie Eilish was an absolute joy to behold. Just one small suggestion.
I remember seeing Billie Eilish perform live for the first time, at Charlotte’s Spectrum Center in October 2018, when she opened for Florence + The Machine — when Eilish was just 16 years old, when barely any adult had ever heard her name.
She was a weird and wonderful revelation.
Her sound wasn’t simply subversive as compared to garden-variety pop; it almost felt like it was of another planet, from the seemingly ASMR-inspired vocals to the dark, moody, sometimes-creepy-sometimes-sleepy instrumentation. Yet she also had this groovy energy, a convulsive, bopping enthusiasm that infected everyone who’d gotten there early enough to catch her lean, mean 12-song set.
In the three years and just over four months since that night, Eilish has blossomed into one of the most popular young music stars on Earth, and on Sunday night she returned to North Carolina to do a show more than twice as long and several times as spectacular for a crowd of well north of 10,000 screaming fans.
Almost all of the adjectives I used for her 2018 performance would apply again: weird, wonderful, groovy, convulsive, energetic. The only word I’d have more difficulty using this time would be subversive.
I mean, her music is still subversive. It’s just ... well, I’ll explain in a minute. Let me cover some other ground here first.
This was only the third stop on Eilish’s “Happier Than Ever” tour, which launched Thursday in New Orleans then stopped in Atlanta on Saturday night for Show #2. But it played like a show that’s already worked out all the kinks: From the moment she magically appeared in the middle of the stage — wearing black pigtails, white sneakers, spandex bike shorts, and an over-sized pink T-shirt that repeated the word “anime” and a NSFW word that was partially obscured — she was in complete command of her performance.
Over the course of just under 95 minutes, the freshly minted 20-year-old performed most of the tracks off of her 2021 album “Happier Than Ever” and much of the music from her 2019 debut “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?,” plus a fistful of “deep cuts” the she carried over from that last show.
The pace could be dizzying, as she wasn’t afraid to reduce already-short songs to one-verse-one-chorus quickies. And the way she moved around the stage could be mesmerizing, whether she was thrashing through a solo mosh while reciting the chorus of “You Should See Me in a Crown”; or affecting a drunken-looking stagger as she sang “Lost Cause”; or ballroom dancing in place during “Billie Bossa Nova,” or slowly rearing her head back until she was basically doing a standing back bend in the middle of “Bury a Friend.”
That said, Eilish did periodically remain still.
Sometimes it was for just a few brief moments, like when she sat down on the end of the catwalk and leaned forward on her knees during the second verse of her playfully brash hit “Therefore I Am,” or when she lay down on her back and rested her head on the stage as she sang “Everybody Dies” over its synth-heavy bass line.
Other times, it was so she could do some light balladeering.
At the show’s midway point, for example, she and her quickly-becoming-very-famous-too older brother Finneas took stools and guitars to the middle of the stage and sat down next to each other. After introducing him as “my best friend and my co-writer and my producer” — and after he quipped, “And this is Billie Eilish, everybody” — she sang the chilling folk ballad “Your Power,” which she called “one of my favorite songs we’ve ever written.”
Later in the show, Eilish returned to her stool with a guitar, by herself this time, and asked all of her fans to take their own seats. (The ones that could, at least. The floor section was general admission and standing only.)
“You didn’t even hesitate,” she said, cackling, as everyone in the lower and upper levels sat immediately upon her request, most having been standing for more than 70 minutes by this point.
She even asked her fans to put their phones down — “we’re all gonna be in this moment, we’re all gonna take a breath, we’re gonna relax, we’re gonna lean back, we can just be happy that we are here,” she told them — and I’ll be darned if all but a very small smattering of them complied.
Eilish then delivered a magical rendition of her achingly haunting “When the Party’s Over.”
Although it’s not always easy to tell, she does have a beautiful voice, most easily recognized when you strip away Finneas’s production and just leave her with an acoustic guitar. What makes her unique, however, are those rougher edges, those mumbled or even whispered lyrics, those violent mid-song shifts in tone and tempo, and — as I mentioned before — those wild ways in which she moves her body.
Seriously, if she’s in motion, she’s in some sort of fascinating-to-behold motion.
This was true when she was here with Florence + The Machine, too. But whereas when Eilish was an opener it was basically just her and a mic as she jumped and swerved and twirled and contorted, this time around, she had a variety of elaborate set pieces at her disposal to add to the eye candy.
For the trip-hoppy “NDA,” for instance, a giant ramp and some high-tech A/V wizardry made it appear as though she was traipsing down the middle of a highway at nighttime as cars projected onto a massive video screen swerved to avoid hitting her.
Later, after jogging from the front of the arena to the back, she climbed into the basket of a massive cherry-picking machine to sing “Overheated” and “Bellyache” — as well as abbreviated versions of “Ocean Eyes” and “Bored” — while it hoisted her 30 feet up and gently swept her over the heads of fans in the lower level.
And as she stomped the ground when Finneas and drummer Andrew Marshall struck the final note of monster hit “Bad Guy,” the show’s penultimate number, tens of thousands of pieces of white confetti exploded from the rafters.
Which brings me to, really, my one and only piece of what is hopefully viewed as constructive (and very mild) criticism.
I’m not opposed to confetti. I’m not opposed to a mid-show mini-set done in a cherry-picker at the back of the arena. I don’t think it was a huge mistake for her to stop to ask how the people in the upper level were doing, and how the people in the lower level were doing, and how the people on the floor were doing, like she did four songs into her Charlotte. It’s not wrong for her to try to get the crowd to do the wave.
It’s just that, for whatever reason, these portions of the show made things feel more cliche than I was anticipating.
What I have loved about Billie Eilish is her subversiveness. The fact that her music, and her aura, and her overall approach to her craft, they aren’t cliches. (Exhibit A: “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” was famously recorded while they sat or sprawled on the bed in Finneas’s room at their parents’ house.) I think that’s why I wish her show — and don’t get me wrong, overall this current one is incredibly well-paced and very, very entertaining — was maybe just a little bit less conventional, and/or a little bit less predictable.
In fact, in some ways, she succeeded in bucking trends during Sunday night’s concert. I appreciate that she didn’t waste time with outfit changes, and that she didn’t waste time with a contrived encore, instead simply opting to announce with two songs to go that ... she had two songs to go (the closer being an absolutely positively knockout rendition of the anthemic “Happier Than Ever”). To me, those decisions jibe with her non-conformist image.
But I think she can get away with coloring outside the typical-pop-show lines even more.
She’s got time to work on this. Again (rather incredibly), she’s only 20 years old. She’s only put out two full-length studio albums in her career. The first won the Grammy for album of the year; the second could well win the same award when the 2022 ceremony is held in April.
On paper, there’s very little she’s doing wrong so far. She can afford to take some risks.
As it pertains to her live performances, I can’t wait to see what those next ones might be.
Billie Eilish’s setlist
1. “Bury a Friend”
2. “I Didn’t Change My Number”
3. “NDA”
4. “Therefore I Am”
5. “My Strange Addiction”
6. “I Don’t Wanna Be You Anymore”
7. “Lovely”
8. “You Should See Me in a Crown”
9. “Billie Bossa Nova”
10. “Goldwing”
11. “Everybody Dies”
12. “Oxytocin”
13. “Ilomilo”
14. “Your Power”
15. “Male Fantasy”
16. “Overheated”
17. “Bellyache”
18. “Ocean Eyes”
19. “Bored”
20. “Getting Older”
21. “Lost Cause”
22. “When the Party’s Over”
23. “All the Good Girls Go to Hell”
24. “Everything I Wanted”
25. “Bad Guy”
26. “Happier Than Ever”
This story was originally published February 7, 2022 at 7:05 AM.
