Kelis
Forum, London
29/11/2010

It’s all well and good the LCD Soundsystems and La Rouxs of the world confirming that, yes, the future really does sound like all those popstrels thirty years ago told us it would, but they don’t seem to be in any hurry to tell us what’s supposed to happen next. Thankfully, at least Kelis seems determined to provide some sort of answer; in truth, of course, she always did, but, with this year’s ‘Flesh Tone’, she’s at last made a record with a genuinely cosmic constancy, and she brings that to life here in no uncertain terms. Why, even the staging is spacious and spacey, with assorted droogs huddling behind pristine panels that squirt and spurt disorientingly delirious electro from every unseen orifice while our protagonist struts in a sizzly-hair, half-bolero jacket and translucent catsuit among a series of neon quarterstaffs.

And, while she was never the warbliest of songstresses, Kelis turns this to her advantage superbly here, playing characters galore with a weirdly welcoming glaciality: there’s the blank dominatrix of the opening ‘Scream’ - even more cascading here than on record, unexpectedly – or the dignified philosopher of ‘Brave’ and, inevitably, the lost-in-music dervish of ‘Acapella’, arguably the year’s most avant-grade top tenner (although, by incorporating brief samples from ‘Pass Out’ and ‘One’ elsewhere, that’s an argument she almost consciously invites). Not that past glories are overlooked, however – ‘Get Along With You’, even ten years on, still sounds some distance from modern sonics, while ‘Young, Fresh And New’ is ever more of a lost classic and performing the, er, acapella of ‘Milkshake’ over Madonna‘s ‘Holiday’ is just inspired – but this is very much an exercise in modern pop and its more excitable cousins as a playground of the imagination. Any wonder we love her so much right now?

Iain Moffat