I’ve never seen a pop singer in concert. Not a musical act that goes by the singer’s stage name and tours with a backing band. I guess it’s just a vein of music I’ve missed out on seeing live. Pop singers, from what I’ve experienced, go straight from unknown to TD Garden. Occasionally you’ll get Sky Ferreira playing Paradise, but that’s a rarity. There’s no local scene for a pop singer here, unless they are targeting the folk crowd, and then usually they’ve got a guitarist and a cute folksy name like Sunny Side Up or Apples & L’Oranges but I guess in this example maybe her name is Lauren so it’s also a play on her name?
And fact of the matter is, I’ll rarely see a show at a massive venue, so I don’t have a whole stack of Ariana Grande and T Swift ticket stubs. So the genre passes me by most of the time. That isn’t to say that BMH is a small-time venue, because obviously it’s not, but it really presented my first exposure to a singer-focused concert and in a comparatively more intimate setting.

I showed up in the middle of Boots’s opening song, so if they explained what the fuck their act was right before the set started then this is all on me. I walked in on some synthy bass and loads of percussion the way I’ve been seeing a lot of lately—the drummer with sample pads and the separate guy banging mallets on a timpani. Boots had a guitar that wasn’t really adding to anything, but the mood was pretty consistently dark and moody dance-pop.
The set got progressively more cut & dry early 2000s rock. It bordered on metal at some points and finally built up to him wailing on a guitar and tossing it on stage (the guitar made no sound during any of this), climbing up onto the rafters, waving to the crowd, swinging down and leaving.
Whoops, I said “finally” up there, which might make you think that Boots had played a huge set, but that was 25 minutes after he took the stage (I checked that I hadn’t missed anything before the song I arrived during). The space between Boots and FKA Twigs lasted twice as long as Boots’s set.

Note: For context, I just Wikipedia’d and apparently Boots is a well-known producer, signed to Roc Nation. He produced and wrote a bunch of Beyoncé’s last album and recently performed with Run The Jewels. It’s possible that he sold all of his songs that are worth listening to and was stuck with the task of putting together his own show, which would explain the shortness and forgetableness of the set.

So after the wait, FKA Twigs took over. As I said, this was a new experience, the fact that the singer is the main act and the musicians seem to be just another place your attention can go. The “band” was made up of three guys, one in back and one on either side of Twigs, playing sample pads. The look was something tribal and primitive, these three men banging percussively on their machines while the songstress writhed and crooned in the middle (more on that later). While there were some drumbeats, however, the sounds didn’t match the look. There were soft background synths and evolving samples.
What was impressive was that these three percussionists kept in sync during all the slow-downs and speed-ups, and there are a whole bunch of them in this set.
The one negative thing I’ll say about watching three sample pads going at once is that some of the pads were clearly linked to more than one effect, and when you do that math, you realize that what’s going on is much more necessary than the one pad that would be required to play the sounds as they were. But it was aesthetic, and two of the guys did switch to guitar and bass, respectively, so I suppose it kept the feel consistent throughout the songs when there were no live instruments.

But Twigs was the star and she is a fantastic star. Her voice is flighty and cracks into silence quite a bit, almost like she’s afraid to really let loose, which gives it so much more power when she does at the peak of a song. It is, after all, a hyper-sexualized show. I normally wouldn’t draw a burlesque comparison, but the outfit she wore evoked that setting. My lack of clothing knowledge prevents me from telling you specifically what she was wearing.
She belly-danced furiously during every song, then would stop to sing sparse vocals and get back to it.  As the show went on, she would be writhing and belting and I just felt out-of-breath for her, but it was fantastic.

The lights were minimal, sometimes just flashing occasionally in a song, adding to the sparseness.  At one point I tried out my phone’s camera during a song and while I was watching back later realized there were almost no visuals save for a blink of light a couple times per chorus.  It was clearly intentional and during other songs, she would be bathed in red or shrunken on the ground in a spotlight.  It felt extremely trippy.
Between songs she was the most demure person. In her English accent, she was bashful and genuinely awe-struck at all the audience was giving her.

Oh did I not mention? The audience was crazy for her. People were handing her gifts that she passed off to the side area, she was interacting with the front row and there were huge screams coming from places that I wasn’t close enough to report on.

Toward the end of the set, she had just played what I would call the highlights of the set, “Video Girl” and her big hit “Two Weeks.” After huge cheers, she stated “well, I was going to be a Debbie Downer and tell you that this is my last song.” It was that perfect shy and apologetic statement she left us with right before she ripped back into belly-dancing and belting, just to float off stage as quick as she had appeared.

I felt like I had come to hear music, and that’s definitely what was going on, but there were theatrics, both from Twigs and how the show was presented that I hadn’t seen in a long time.  It felt like the microcosm of a massive Blue-Hills-Pavillion performance.  What’s on my mind at the average punk or pop/rock show is how fluidly the music is coming out of the guitars.  The music was fluid here, but that was no feat.  She could have phoned it in and still done the songs justice, and the band could have easily hit one sample pad per song and gotten the same effects.  The lights, visuals, tribal aesthetic, no matter how intentional, were what you bought a ticket for.