The La Torre Story (so far...): HalfAChicken.com - 10/1/14 - Kimbra at The Bootleg Theater, Silver Lake, CA

Originally published on 10/1/14 at HalfAChicken.com
https://halfachicken.com/justinavalon/article/100

Hearing the name “Kimbra” probably won’t register anything of note in your head, unless you actually paid attention to the colorful and trip-tastic video for Gotye’s (one) hit song “Somebody that I Used to Know.” She was the decidedly less-freaky-looking one in this disconcerting still art come to life.

Remember when this song was actually a thing? Yeah, neither do I.

But regardless of whether or not Kimbra makes any blips on your musical radar, one thing we can all agree on is that there’s nothing better than a free show, and having even one sort-of-familiar-sounding artist on the bill is a very welcomed bonus. I got the opportunity to see Kimbra for free at the humble and hipstery hole-in-the-wall known as The Bootleg Theater this past weekend. This show marked the end of her residency at The Bootleg, and would feature songs from her latest album, The Golden Echo, which was released back in August.

To be honest, I walked into this show completely blind. I had no prior knowledge of what Kimbra’s music sounded like, and other than my rather presumptuous hypothesis that all her stuff would emulate that one Gotye song in some way, I had no real expectations for what I would hear. Still, this is why I go to local shows. LA is a rich cornucopia of art and culture; there’s always something to discover, good or bad. Chance favors the bold, and serendipity had thus far been a very rewarding mistress to me when it came to hitting up random venues to see bands I barely knew.

Well, as it turned out, my Gotye hypothesis was partially right, in the sense that just like watching Gotye’s freaky video, watching Kimbra perform was a sensory mindfuck from beginning to end.

If your idea of décor involves Technicolor skulls and bad TV reception…you just might be an indie artist.

Kimbra’s music is generally described as “jazz-inspired electropop” with influence drawn from Imogen Heap, Prince, Rufus Wainwright, and Mike Patton, among others. A very good playlist indeed, and seemingly nothing out of the ordinary about it. One of my concert compatriots even mentioned hearing her previous album Vows and saying that it sounded like “normal music,” whatever that means.

What we heard at this show, however, was a total “fuck-it-all” to any notions of radio-friendly commercial normalcy, delving into a realm of aural oddities and ambient white noise that threw us for a complete loop. For those looking for a crash course into the musical direction Kimbra took in The Golden Echo, the best way I can describe it is to imagine a vinyl player churning out psychedelic(er) remixes of Bjork songs down an empty sewer tunnel, with a cat providing accompaniment by blindly pawing at the keys of a broken grand piano. That’s sort of what it sounded like while Kimbra was playing. I don’t know if that was intentional or if the sound guy was mixing it badly or what. All I know is that whether it was out of mesmerized curiosity or flabbergasted confusion, Kimbra held my attention, which was probably the point anyways.

Actually, seeing this at the show would have been a huge improvement.

That’s not to say that it was completely unbearable to listen to. Actually, I found it to be quite the opposite; the layering of all the different sounds made for an interesting and developed “sound world” that really filled up the meager space of The Bootleg’s “Space Jam” theater, and Kimbra’s scatty and yipping vocalizations matched the playful energy she radiated as she skipped and danced around the stage. The crazy visual projections you see in the pictures above really helped to pull the performance together as well, turning the stage into a “living music video” of sorts, where the audience was not only witness to the experience, but a central part of the experience as well. All in all, it was surprisingly entertaining for what it was.

Looking back at it, the real crux of the concert’s shortcomings fell mainly upon our musical palettes. Most of the people in the audience were used to these sort of off-beat noise experiments, indicative of an underground scene that was known and enjoyed by only a select few. For them, this music was pure magic, filling them up with a strange primal energy that, combined with a little alcohol- and cannabis-induced inspiration, moved them to sway and dance and clap and get lost in Kimbra’s freeform, unstructured ambience.

These folks should start a club.

However, to us, the decidedly “mainstream-adjusted” listeners, this music was a little too “out there.” The lack of typical song elements such as structure and refrain made it hard to really attach ourselves to any particular moment in the set, and everything blended together into a continuous cacophony of unintelligible sound. The seemingly random noisemaking coming from Kimbra and her backing instrumentals hovered somewhere between sonically interesting and utterly pointless at times, and were it not for her physicality on stage, it would have been a very monotonous affair to sit through after your eyes adjusted to the LSD-like effect of the stage’s aesthetics.

Hey, illusory dragons have feelings too…

Overall, I would say that Kimbra’s performance was a triumph in regards to being original and making something that expressed nothing less than her own creativity, passion, and joy. After all, that is the essence of what makes an artist successful, and Kimbra succeeds flawlessly at this. I will caution anyone who is stepping into Kimbra’s world for the first time that she definitely not for everyone, and that her brief appearance in Gotye’s song does not do justice to the unique sound and experience that is her art. Neophytes would do well to enter this with a very open mind and forget everything they thought they knew about music. If you can get over the quirky and unconventional nuances of her sound and dig into the “experience” that is a Kimbra show, you’ll no doubt be tuned into one of the most promising and remarkable artists present in today’s underground music scene, a true diamond in the rough.

For the rest of us, we’ll content ourselves with that overplayed Gotye song. At least there’s a chorus we can sing along with.