Billie Eilish roars and whispers in hometown show at the Forum
Billie Eilish sat down cross-legged on the Kia Forum stage like a kindergarten teacher calming her class for story time.
The 22-year-old pop superstar had just summoned the voices of thousands as they sang along — or rather, as they screamed along — with Eilish’s song “Lunch,” in which she delights in the body of a woman who “dances on my tongue, tastes like she might be the one.” Now, half an hour or so into her sold-out concert Sunday night, she wanted to try something different: Speaking slowly and soothingly, Eilish asked the crowd to quiet so she could use a piece of looping software to build a little choir of Billies in “When the Party’s Over.”
The silence that ensued was stunning in its fullness: a pleasingly counterintuitive demonstration of the fierce adulation she was just barely holding back.
The first of five dates scheduled through Saturday at the Inglewood arena, Sunday’s gig opened a hometown stand that will wrap Eilish’s North American tour behind “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” which came out in May and racked up the usual numbers and plaudits, including nominations for album, record and song of the year at February’s Grammy Awards. The LP, her third, delivers the crisply detailed electro-goth sound she and her brother-slash-producer, Finneas, have been known for since Eilish broke out at age 13 with her viral hit “Ocean Eyes.”
But the album also explores new emotional territory — most significantly as pertains to her feelings on queer desire — and showcases new elements of Eilish’s singing, which tended earlier toward the light and whispery and has grown throatier and more muscular with age.
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Dressed in a football jersey and bicycle shorts, her long dark hair tucked beneath a backwards ball cap, Eilish toggled between jubilation and confession at the Forum, skipping across the wide rectangular stage as she belted “Chihiro” and her oldie “Bad Guy,” then huddling with her two background vocalists — friends of hers since middle school, she pointed out — for “Your Power,” a haunting acoustic ballad about an abusive figure.
“To everyone in the room — but specifically to all the women in the room — I want you to know that you are safe here and you are seen,” she said before that number.
For “The Greatest,” which might have the new album’s most impressive vocal moment, Eilish climbed aboard a moving platform that elevated her high above the stage: just the vantage from which to unleash her commanding rock howl. To mark both the approaching holiday and the hometown setting, she sang a pretty version of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” toying with the song’s melody to draw out its lush melancholy.
This tour (which will pack back up next year in Australia and Europe) is Eilish’s first without Finneas as a member of her band. But after she introduced him as “my original, only bandmate,” Finneas turned up Sunday to close the show with his sister. Together they performed “What Was I Made For?” — the Oscar-winning “Barbie” ballad that for some reason inspired a fan to throw an object at Eilish during a show last week in Arizona — and a thrashing “Happier Than Ever” before ending with “Birds of a Feather,” the siblings’ perversely breezy summer hit about longing for a love that lasts “till I rot away, dead and buried / Till I’m in the casket you carry.”
It’s a characteristically bleak image from Eilish, who’s done as much as anyone to make pop a place to think through complicated ideas about mental health. Here, her arm draped merrily around her brother, she sang it as though it were a lesson in how to be happy.
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