Kelela – The Studio January 19, 2018

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The 13th Floor’s Kate Powell ventured out to The Studio to catch Kelela’s performance. Here is her reaction, along with photos from Veronica McLaughlin.

I really wanted to love this show.

Along with FKA Twigs and SZA, Kelela’s critically acclaimed debut Take Me Apart has firmly ensconced her in Future R & B. Rather than making the firm leap from smokey club fringes to slick commercial pop, Kelela remains in between.

Each song is heavily layered with traditional pop structures- “ahhhs” and “ooohs” only to merge with off-kilter elements- backgrounds that overlap rather than blend in a space where verse and chorus structures that are not clearly defined. This jolty undercurrent gives the songs a feeling of being impulsive and obsessive. While the R&B standards of vulnerability, sensuality, passion and strength are intertwined into a matrix of synthetic sounds enfolding Kelela’s honeyed vocals in a way that’s  not dissimilar to Janet Jackson’s 1997 album Velvet Rope.

Despite the obvious lineage and signposting of this album, it’s still an enjoyable record that has ganered considerable critical acclaim for the artist who has also worked with Clams Casino, Danny Brown and The XX’s Romy Madley-Croft and sold out shows around the world.

Bearing all of her successes in mind, I don’t understand how she managed to get it so wrong at last night’s performance at The Studio to only a few hundred punters.

Blue smoke swirled around the stage and the audience cheered as two backup singers in oversized white shirt dresses took their places. Immediately, their vocals swirled with their DJ to create a moody, sensual tension as Kelela herself stepped out of the haze and launched into Blue Light. Like her backup dancers, she too was clad in a white outfit that could have been taken from Aaliyah’s wardrobe in 2000. Watching her silhouetted hands twist in time to the beat, her velveteen vocals were in full flight for only a few short minutes.

And it was all downhill from there.

Like any fashion, music goes in cycles. For someone in their late 20s (like myself) the current trend for 90s/2000s anything is equal parts alarming and amusing. But because they were almost three and two decades ago, both eras are ripe for the cultural and nostalgic picking.

Kelela is picking up on the trend for rewinding and fast-forwarding that was so popular in R&B between 1997 and 2001 but last night found herself stuck on pause to the point it was derivative. Everything that had made Take Me Apart interesting did not translate to her live performance. And it didn’t have to be that way. SZA’s recent performance at the Logan Campbell Centre proved that.

But at The Studio, the beats became one perpetual drone, making differentiating songs an almost impossible task as one dull moment merged seamlessly into another. At too many points throughout the show, the music became muddied and disorientating. The DJ pounded his keys with abandon, the two backup singers powerful voices swirled around the beat, and Kelela’s voice, which should have been the focal point of everything, was completely lost.

For the majority of her set, Kelela seemed to be at odds with her bandmates, pushing her vocals to a thin, reedy breaking point in an attempt to be heard. This was only compounded by her largely listless stage performance.

Let Me Know (LMK), arguably her biggest hit, gave us a flash of what her show could have been- cute aughties choreography, hitting her notes with an easy confidence and owning the stage with sass and swagger. But it was one bright spot in an otherwise boring set that felt like we were watching her do bad impersonations of her idols. It was sad to watch a woman who has created an album that has been rightly praised give a performance that strips it of any uniqueness. All we were left with was an evening held together by pastiches and a crowd that was largely too young to remember the references the first time round.

Kate Powell

Click on any image to view a photo gallery by Veronica McLaughlin:

 

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