Mitski at Kings Theatre, Brooklyn: A Study in Stillness
By Yusuf Qureshi
The lights go down and nothing happens for forty-five seconds. The sold-out crowd at Kings Theatre, three thousand strong, holds its breath. Then a single violin note from the pit, and the show begins.
Mitski has, over the course of five records and a brief retirement, become the most interesting live performer in American indie rock. She is not a traditionally charismatic frontperson. She does not banter. She rarely addresses the audience between songs. What she does, with increasing precision, is stage herself. The current tour, in support of The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, is her most ambitious attempt at this yet.
Choreography as text
The show opens with Mitski prone on a long wooden table, lit from below. She rolls, slowly, from one end to the other over the course of "Bug Like an Angel." The movement is small and controlled and almost unbearable to watch. The audience is dead silent for the duration. At the end of the song she sits up and the lights change and the band crashes into "Working for the Knife" and the room exhales.
This is the pattern of the night: long passages of absolute stillness, broken by sudden kineticism. The staging is spare — a chair, a table, a single standing microphone, a few props. The band is dressed in matching black. Mitski is in a white dress that looks like a nightgown and, by the end of the show, a shroud.
She is not asking for your approval. She is telling you where to look.
The setlist decision
The surprise of the night is how many old songs she plays. "Washing Machine Heart" gets a mid-set outing. "Me and My Husband" is slowed down and restaged as a kind of waltz. "Nobody" closes the main set with a two-minute solo piano outro that reduces half the crowd to tears. She has not retired these songs even though she has every right to.
The new material lands with less immediacy but more weight. "My Love Mine All Mine" is already the most-streamed song of her career; live it is quieter than the recording, almost whispered. "The Deal" is terrifying in the room. "I Don't Like My Mind" is funny, which is the surprise of the album and the surprise of the show.
The encore
She returns alone for the encore. She plays "A Pearl" and "I Will" on acoustic guitar. She says "thank you" into the microphone for the first time all night. The audience applauds for ninety seconds. She bows, once, and leaves.
What it means
Mitski's live show is the most considered theatrical experience in indie rock right now, and it is theatrical in the real sense of the word — a shape, a form, a thought developed over ninety minutes. What she is building, show by show, is a vocabulary of restraint. It is deeply unfashionable. It is also extremely good.