Grimes wows crowd with energetic set
Artist screeches, yells and yelps her way through performance
OAKLAND — Grimes knew it was time to get real.
So, just moments into her sold-out show on Wednesday night at the Fox Theater, she stopped and let the 2,800 fans in attendance know what was really going on in her world.
“So, if I am making weird noises it’s because I’m hiccupping,” explained the 28year-old synth-pop musician-producer, whose real name is Claire Boucher.
She must hiccup a lot. Because Grimes has been making weird noises — bizarrely alluring, often befuddling noises — basically her entire career. And it’s the combination of strange vocal tics and surprising beats that separates Grimes from the pack and makes her the rare synthpop artist worth paying attention to in 2016.
That quirky combination is probably also what keeps her from becoming a mainstream success. Yet, maybe she doesn’t need the mainstream.
Sure, she doesn’t get played on commercial radio and hasn’t been able to make much progress on the charts. But her videos have proved quite popular on the Internet, helping Grimes earn the Webby Award for artist of the year in 2013. And Grimes — who’s in California to perform at the mammoth Coachella music festival — is a definite hit on the concert circuit.
It was easy to understand why on Wednesday, as Grimes wowed the young hipster crowd with a dizzyingly energetic set that ran just over an hour. The music was unsettling, occasionally chaotic and pulsed with the feeling that the whole thing might just spiral out of control at any moment.
Backed by three dancers (one of whom also added some backing vocals), Grimes screeched, yelled and yelped her way through “Flesh Without Blood,” “Realiti” and other offerings from her most recent album, “Art Angels.” There were no other musicians onstage, just Grimes, who occasionally pushed buttons on her synthesizer as she sang along to the tracks. The stage was a sea of swirling, pulsating lights, creating a vibe that meshed perfectly with the music.
It was a strikingly professional production, which made her amateur stage banter seem all that more bizarre. She just made seemingly random statements to the audience, having to do with such things as the proper length of her guitar strap.
“I’m going to keep it long because my guitar playing will be less perfect,” Grimes said. “But my guitar playing was never perfect.”
Her voice sounded OK — no better — but she’s not trying to pass herself off as a particularly strong vocalist. She made up for her lack of octaves by embracing her wild side, turning out a fiery version of “Scream” that definitely lived up to the title, only to douse the emotion and softly soar with “Butterfly.”
She brought the main set to what appeared to be a close with “World Princess Part II,” only to then explain why tonight’s encore would be handled a bit differently.
“My stage fright is so bad that if I leave the stage, I can’t re-enter the stage,” she said.
So she just stuck around and crooned a powerful version of “Kill v. Maim,” which sent the crowd home on a high note.