As October turned to November, I happened across a post that said, “I’m on a bit of a ‘kittenish female vocal + crashy-smashy goth-punk instrumental’ kick; for today’s fix, I hearken back to Poppy’s spiritual foremothers, Jack Off Jill.” Jack Off Jill is one of my favorite bands; from 2002 until the end of the ’00s, I would have told you that Clear Hearts Grey Flowers was my favorite album, and it’s been a close second to Die Mannequin’s Fino + Bleed since then. But who was this “Poppy”? If someone out there is doing kittenish female vocals over crashy-smashy goth-punk instrumentals, I want to know about it! As it turned out, there was another post from a few days earlier that explained: apparently Poppy was a “video performance artist and online phenomenon” who had left the author “absorbed by the doll-like affect, the powdered-sugar voice reminiscent of Disney’s Snow White, the Bambi eyes, the too-long silences, the pastel-hued uncanny of it all”. Now she was doing music, the author continued, linking to a song called “Concrete” which, according to the post, “throws a couple of different musical genres into a blender and purees them into a tasty smoothie”. Intriguing! And while I don’t usually care much about lyrics, this also seemed promising: “Lyrically it has its moments too: ‘bury me six feet deep’ is standard gothic melodrama, but ‘ … cover me with concrete / turn me into a street’ takes that idea to a much more interesting place”. I clicked the link.
“Concrete” begins with a siren, and then the whispered vocals mentioned above come in, along with a tachycardic click track—but soon they are interrupted by a drum salvo and a burst of electric guitar that announce that the rock is about to get underway. And it’s… kawaii metal! Not long ago I was introduced (by someone who later proved to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Poppy’s life and work) to the song “Gimme Chocolate” by Japan’s Babymetal, and this was much in the same vein as Babymetal’s performance on Stephen Colbert’s show: dudes costumed into anonymity thrashing away at their guitars and drums so fast as to cross the line into silliness, this time with one wispy lass on vocals instead of three, but wearing an equally preposterous outfit as she sang, “Chewy chewy, yummy yummy yummy!” Except the Babymetal song I saw did not make a seamless transition from there into singing about how “Demons in my dreams / Watch me while I sleep” the way that Poppy did. Nor did Babymetal put the brakes on the kawaii to slow down into sludge rock before taking a whiplash turn into the sort of pop you’d find on your favorite 45 back in 1960. This part reaffirmed that Poppy’s vocals were not striking me as particularly kittenish. It is a pretty common trick among the bands I like to juxtapose childlike vocals with raucous cacophany: early Jack Off Jill is like this, Scheer was introduced to me as “a little girl singing with a heavy metal band”, and Julie Christmas of Made Out of Babies has referred to her singing style as a “freakout seven-year-old crackhead impression”. Even Courtney Love, who sang in a very different style, wore babydoll dresses back in the day. Which brings me to the other end of the spectrum: the women with powerful vocals that match the instrumentation rather than going for ironic contrast. That’s what you get with a Hole record, or later Jack Off Jill and Scarling, or Die Mannequin. But neither of these was what I heard in this section of “Concrete”. When Poppy sang “Some people like candy / Some people like coffee,” she wasn’t belting it out like a rock star, but neither was it cute. I’d say, “She sang like an angel!”, but that suggests something ethereal, and it wasn’t quite that either. As non-specific as this word is, it was just straightforwardly beautiful. And yet again, we somehow start with candy and end up with an equally beautiful paean to “the taste of young blood in my teeth”. Then we’re back to the kawaii metal, before a final swerve into pop, but this time it’s a more modern pop style. And as much as this is not my usual style, as far as I’m concerned this is where the song gets truly brilliant. Because it sounds like the theme from Dawson’s Creek! “Don’t want to wait forever and ever,” Poppy croons—except what she can’t wait for is what she so very sweetly pleads that listener do for her: “Turn me into a street, turn me into a street”. Fade out. Mosaic of Youtube recommendations if you liked this video. And much as “Beat the Clock” left me interested in hearing other Sparks songs, only to discover that that meant embarking upon a decades-long saga through countless genres of music, I discovered that clicking on other Poppy songs led me into another saga, with nearly as many twists and turns, but packed into a much shorter span of time.
In the early 2010s, Moriah Pereira was one of the many teenagers posting cover songs to Youtube. Her channel was called Moriah Poppy, the “Poppy” part coming from a childhood nickname forced on her by an insistent preschool friend. Like many of her peers, she sang in an affected style that sounded simultaneously elderly and babyish: creaky-voiced, yet struggling with r’s and torturing diphthongs the way preschoolers do. She also posted “vlogs” showing off her outfits. At eighteen she tried to go professional by moving from Nashville to Los Angeles, where she soon formed a romantic and professional partnership with Corey Mixter, eight years her senior, who performed music and directed videos under the name “Titanic Sinclair”. Mixter had spent the previous five years in a band called Mars Argo, fronted by a high-voiced, bleach-blonde singer named Brittany Sheets, with whom he made quirky Youtube videos set in a white void. Their music was the sort of indie rock that would not have seemed at all out of place on 120 Minutes, which was appointment viewing for me back in the mid-’90s; Mixter’s early work with Pereira was much in the same vein, and her first single, “Everybody Wants to Be Poppy”, is frock rock of the highest order, full of catchy hooks with even catchier hooks piled on top. (Apparently Pereira got some vocal coaching after arriving in L.A., because the accent on her own stuff sounds nothing like her teenage covers of “Sunglasses at Night” and the like.) They made several other songs in this vein, and several of them are dynamite: “Heavy Metal” lurks just outside my top 100, and “Renegade” is another winner. But I’ve only heard them because they were leaked years after they were recorded; they never received an official release. The frock rock was a false start. Pereira and Mixter decided to retool.
“Everybody Wants to Be Poppy” had been supported by a short cartoon series which depicted the titular singer with purple hair, cat ears, blush marks, and a babydoll dress straight out of Courtney Love’s early-’90s wardrobe. But after the reset, that look was consigned to the same memory hole as the Moriah Poppy channel, all biographical information about Moriah Pereira, and even her name; she was now just Poppy, from the Internet… a high-voiced, bleach-blonde singer who made quirky Youtube videos set in a white void. Her new music, showcased on the 2016 EP Bubblebath, was mainstream pop with a twist of ska, but that was almost beside the point. If you’re going to make videos about a Life Model Decoy programmed to be a pop star, then, sure, you need some pop songs for her to perform. But the primary focus of the Poppy project was the video series: interviewing potted plants, getting stalked by a jealous mannequin, trying to figure out these Earth things called shoes. Here’s probably my favorite, in which she tries to activate her introduction routines and encounters a glitch:
I do like that one—for those of us inhibited in social situations, it hits close to home, and I think it’s well acted—but for the most part these videos are pretty thin gruel. The kids who spend their lives on Youtube were apparently really into them, though. “The one in which she apologizes is such a perfect satire of Youtube stars who make apology videos!!” Okay, zoomer. In any case, the videos further infiltrated the music with Poppy’s first full album, Poppy . Computer, which incorporated 8-bit sounds in the service of songs exploring the experience of being an artificial construct, native to the Internet, who spends her days making videos and putting on pop concerts. It ain’t great; on the scale I use for comparing albums, with silence scoring a zero and Fino + Bleed checking in at 101, Poppy . Computer lands somewhere around a three. Most of Poppy’s next album, 2018’s Am I a Girl?, is even worse: back to generic pop, with shallow lyrics about how famous and fashionable she is. Yet a couple of her 2018 songs are among her best—oddly, they’re the ones that play on her robotic persona yet were written by people other than her usual team. She covered Gary Numan’s “Metal” (outshining both the original and the Nine Inch Nails cover, both in her vocals and in the texture of the instrumentation) and performed electronica composer Thomas “Diplo” Pentz’s “Time Is Up”, an instant classic about the triumph of A.I. But perhaps the most important song of 2018 as far as Poppy’s career trajectory is concerned was “X”, which alternated between sunshine pop and crunchy hard rock before synthesizing the two in the final chorus. “X” is not one of my favorites, but it set the template that would make Poppy my favorite active musician.
In 2019 Poppy released an EP called Choke. I’m much more interested in music than in lyrics, but still, let’s take a look at how the lyrics of Choke compare to those of Poppy’s previous two records:
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Poppy . Computer (2017): “the future is so pretty, we’re livin’ in harmony” “I’m softer than a daisy, if you cut me I bleed pink” “I like you and you like me” “I’m so in love with the man of the future” “come on and kiss me and hug me” “I feel the technology beat deep inside of me” “pop belongs to everyone” | |
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Am I a Girl? (2018): “I am busy and important” “my hair and makeup make you envious and want to die” “go hard, baby, no regrets” “foxy, fancy, what you gonna do about it?” “I’m sorry, B, he’s hot for me” “this is the best bang since the big one” “pose for a photograph, put on my pretty face” | |
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Choke (2019): “help, I’m drowning, there’s nobody around me” “I can’t feel my fingers, I can’t feel my toes, there’s blood on my necklace and blood on my clothes” “I wear my scary mask when I’m afraid I don’t belong” “I SAID DON’T LOOK AT ME!” “cut out my tongue so that I can’t scream” “antibiotics keep me alive now that everyone I love has died” “I screamed at God, how dare you put me in my place” |
My musical tastes aren’t quite as narrow as I sometimes suggest. Yes, I imprinted on Nirvana when I was seventeen, and most of the bands I would name as my favorites in later years tread a lot of the same lyrical territory. Sell the kids for food, throw me in the fire and I won’t throw a fit, watch me break and watch me burn, I envy your demise, I live my life in ruins, the patron saint of self-injury, kill me faster with strawberry gashes all over, heading for the gun I can see rock bottom, tearing at my skin leaving knives in my brain, burn the whites of my eyes out, all around the angels scream and close the gates of heaven—you know, the kind of stuff that music’s all about! Or at least the music that I’m most into, music that takes the dark feelings that for many of us dominate our emotional landscape and transmutes them into something jaggedly beautiful. But I’m also into other stuff! When my car stereo is randomly selecting songs from my thumb drive, it’s just as likely to pull up some peppy female-fronted power pop (the “frock rock” mentioned above): for every Die Mannequin song there’ll be one by Veruca Salt, and for every Made Out of Babies song there’ll be one by Letters to Cleo. Some bands bridge these worlds: the Dollyrots and Bangs sound like upbeat garage bands, yet the songs of theirs that landed in my top ten feature lines such as “shrapnel confetti soldiers” and “we cry ourselves to sleep”. But Poppy is the first musician I’ve followed to start off doing frock rock, cycle through a few other genres, and end up singing “poison the children, no peace of mind” over a roar of goth-metal guitars.
Poppy calls her current musical stage “post-genre”. She’s now signed to a metal label, and when her latest album, I Disagree, came out on the 10th of this month, I expected to find it shelved under Metal, or maybe under Alternative Rock, or possibly even under Pop if the proprietors were trying to keep her records together. So I was surprised to find that Amoeba Music had classified it as, of all things, electronica. Maybe I shouldn’t have been: if they were going on recent history, it’s a fair categorization, since synth loops do dominate three of the five songs on the Choke EP. The title track of that EP has her reciting lyrics over an electronic riff in a manner that prompted a Youtube comment that I didn’t write but which the kids would have me tag with a cheerful “it me”:
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“Who’s your favorite rapper?” “Poppy” “Uh, Poppy isn’t really a—” “POPPY” |
“Voicemail” is electronica, or “electropop” according to the Poppy wiki, and makes heavy use of electronic pitch shifting. “Meat” opens with a synth line that sounds like the starbase theme in Star Control II. So, sure, I can see why Amoeba made the call it did. But “The Holy Mountain” is basically just vocals and piano, and “Scary Mask” is a return to the “X” formula, alternating between pash and thrash. This isn’t exactly the same quiet-loud-quiet-loud blueprint that Nirvana popularized: the verses of “Scary Mask” don’t just have the distortion pedal turned off, but sound like the dreamy lament of the heroine of a mid-century melodrama. By the same token, the choruses don’t just have the distortion pedal turned on, but feature an actual metal band making a guest appearance on the track—whereas back in his Nirvana days, Dave Grohl would chide reporters who only had one term for music louder than Madonna’s: “We’re heavy, but we’re not metal.” This may seem like so much hair-splitting, the sonic equivalent of the kids ten years ago who would look at two identical haircuts and insist that that one was emo but that one was scene. And I can see how some could listen to I Disagree and argue, “‘Post-genre’? It’s the ‘X’ genre ten times in a row!” But I’d say that the album varies the “X” formula enough from one track to the next that Poppy’s label (or anti-label) for her current music strikes me as justified. A quick rundown:
You already know about “Concrete”. It’s worth pointing out that this is the only song on the album with kawaii-metal segments—that actually would have been a not entirely unpredictable direction for Poppy to go after Poppy . Computer, but at the moment it looks to have been a one-time thing.
I sent my former bandmate Matthew Amster-Burton a link to “I Disagree” (the album’s title track) since many of his lyrical contributions involved some variation on the theme of burning it down, and the chorus to this one begins, “Down / Let it all burn down / Burn it to the ground”—it seemed to be in his wheelhouse. I also figured that anyone would be interested in any chorus sung so deliciously. He agreed that the chorus was mind-blowing but thought that the verses needed a lot of work. I guess that (ironically enough) I can’t really disagree. It’s interesting that on this song the harsh singing accompanies the quiet parts, while the instrumentation on the gorgeous chorus is straight metal; the singing on the bridge is also pretty, but the utopian lyrics and sunshine pop of that section make for a less interesting juxtaposition with the vocals.
With “Bloodmoney” Poppy goes industrial: there are a few brief choral interludes, but for the most part Poppy snarls a single line on repeat while her band bludgeons the listener with infrasound. It’s great! The best part is an instrumental break that proves not to be entirely instrumental: it turns out to be punctuated with nearly subliminal laughs, gasps, and shrieks that vaulted this song from sitting just outside my Hot 100 up into its upper reaches.
“Anything Like Me” has another minimalist chorus, though this time Poppy is double tracked, with one take in a whisper and the other doing her best Julie Christmas impression. The shoegazey outro goes on a little long for my taste, but it makes the freakout-rock stinger at the end that much more effective.
“Fill the Crown” is where the aforementioned goth-metal comes in. It took a little while for this one to grow on me, since when I put on a Poppy song I want to hear Poppy and not a Very Special Guest, and it seems that all the Poppyseeds found something to hate about it: I’ve found multiple fan cuts with various sections chopped out of it. But it’s one of the linchpins of the album. At first it seems like a throwback to 2018 or even 2016 with its opening pop section, but then comes a techno section with synthetic vocal stuttering à la Max Headroom or Paul Hardcastle’s “19”—and then the aforementioned goth-metal guitars march in like an invading army. Back to pop, back to metal, on to a stretch of dreamy drifting away… and then back comes the stuttering, and a squall of what some have called math rock but apparently isn’t actually math rock. It’s a sequence like the ones in (for example) Made Out of Babies’ “Cooker” or Cardiacs’ “Is This the Life?” that sounds like a string of random notes but which somehow holds together. I really like that trick and would like to hear more good songs that use it, but so far searching on “string of seemingly random notes” has not produced promising results.
I suppose I never did mention that Poppy released two albums of ambient music amidst all this other stuff, did I? Some of that shows through on “Nothing I Need”, the first break from the rock and the weakest song on the album, though apparently the one whose lyrics are most important to Poppy herself. It’s not bad by any means, but it’s a sleepy ’70s groove that is not particularly my thing.
Back to the starbase with “Sit/Stay”, which alternates between frantic electronica and that shoegazey stuff. Thumbs up.
“Bite Your Teeth” feels like a B-side, but not every song has to be a major opus, and I like this one quite a bit: a lot of my favorite songs put percussion front and center, and this may be the most emphasis a Poppy song has put on drums. I also like the chime-heavy stretch that sound like a jingle from a 1960s commercial, and the vocal delivery in the “don’t cry, keep on tryin’” bit—it’s spunky!
Toggle your guitar switch to the bottom pickup for “Sick of the Sun”, a distant echoey number unlike anything else on the album up to this point.
And then we get to “Don’t Go Outside”. (As a chronic jaw-clencher who gets migraines when exposed to daylight and rarely leaves the apartment by choice, I couldn’t help but think that a sequence of songs titled “Bite Your Teeth”, “Sick of the Sun”, and “Don’t Go Outside” hit a little close to home.) This starts off as a beautiful lullaby for the apocalypse, and then when the heavy stuff finally comes crashing in, it’s space rock, which then gives way to more one-line minimalism and then an arena rock guitar solo… and as that fades out, and the third and final soft part begins, well… the first time I listened to this album, it was about three in the morning, and it took me a second to realize that she was singing the chorus to “I Disagree” again, this time without all the layers of production. And then in came the refrain from “Fill the Crown”, and the opening to “Concrete”, and the ending to “Anything Like Me”, and, yeah, this is Poppy doing the Quadrophenia / Here Comes the Zoo thing of weaving a bunch of the foregoing songs together. Except by releasing those songs as singles ahead of time, this wasn’t just the unification of half an hour’s worth of songs—these were songs I’d been living with for months.
And I can only imagine how this resolution, and the album as a whole, must have felt to those who have followed Poppy’s entire career. One of the interesting paradoxes that underlie art is that often works become more resonant the more specific they are, rather than the more universal. The lines Poppy calls back for her closing flourish are not exactly unique. As noted, my bandmate Matthew was penning songs with lines like “let it all burn down” when Poppy was a toddler. As also noted, “bury me six feet deep” is pretty generic, to the point that a search pulls up page after page of songs by other people using the same line. As for “you can be anything you want to be”, well, how different is that from “I’m not here to tell you what to say or be” from “Everybody Wants to Be Poppy”? But attach those lines to a bizarre story such as “I spent years of my life taking on the persona of another woman, bleaching my hair blonde, making hundreds of Youtube videos set in a white void, and making all public appearances in character as a feather-voiced robotic ingenue, in order to further the art project of (and perhaps cater to the fetish of) a guy who renamed himself after a shipwreck, and I don’t want to do that anymore”, and now you’ve really got something.
I knew virtually none of this back in November when I hopped online to see whether Poppy might be playing anywhere nearby. I just thought, “Hey, this ‘Concrete’ song is pretty good! ‘I Disagree’ isn’t bad either! Just the other day I was telling my students that I haven’t heard of any musicians who debuted in the 2010s, but with two months to spare, I’ve not only heard of one, but it’s one I actually like! I wonder whether she’s coming to my town?” As it turned out, by sheer coincidence, I happen to live where Poppy launched her tour backing I Disagree. Meaning that last Wednesday, I got to see the very first concert that Poppy put on after her split with Corey Mixter, after she’d dropped the Youtube character and returned her hair to its natural brown—and the first time ever that she would play half a dozen of her latest songs live. Here’s how it went!
First, getting to the venue. The concert was at the Great American Music Hall, a venue in the Tenderloin dating back to 1907. I knew that the Tenderloin was considered the seedy part of San Francisco, the only part where someone could find a studio apartment for less than three thousand dollars. And yeah, this is the version of San Francisco that the Republicans use to scare voters about life in the blue states: one stretch of Hyde Street turned out to be a gigantic homeless encampment, with piles of human feces dotting the sidewalk and local denizens shouting, “Ogg-bla-bla-blah! Ogg-bla-bla-blah!” Our walk across the Tenderloin gave my date many interesting things to say about the psychological effects of urban abjection. We soon got to experience more of those effects, as even after we scrapped our provisional plan to stop somewhere to eat and instead went straight to the venue, we ended up waiting in line on the O’Farrell Street sidewalk for forty minutes. “I know a secret about Poppy!” said an erratically behaving gentleman as he blew smoke in my face. “She has a black cat that she keeps in a black bag!” But though going hungry is no fun, it soon became clear that we’d made the right choice in skipping dinner: we got in early enough that we were able to zip up the stairs and watch the show from seats the balcony. Meaning that we didn’t have to stand for hours on end, or have our view blocked by taller concertgoers, or risk life and limb when aggressive metalheads and shirtless bros treated the choruses like an NFL line of scrimmage. (I did a bit of crowd-watching from my perch overlooking the stage, as I’d wondered what a Poppy audience would look like in 2020; the answer, as you might expect, is “diverse”, with nerdy Asian guys with glasses and receding hairlines standing cheek by jowl with 6'6", 300-lb transwomen in full KISS makeup.)
The opening act was a band called Vowws, a duo who crouched in the dark playing an interminable set of shapeless spooky electronica with indiscernible vocals. They took a couple of days to pack up their stuff and then about a week and a half went by as the crew took a stage that had seemed cramped with two people on it and refit it for five. Finally it was time for the headline act. Poppy stood in front of a lightbox (out of which I had actually expected her to emerge, as she had been quarantined in a box during her Kids React appearance); flanking her were Nicolas Perez on guitar (who, due to the nature of Poppy’s music, had to keep switching between electric and acoustic mid-song), Matt McJunkins on bass, Ralph Alexander on drums, and Ted Gowans on keyboards and laptops. I figured I should mention their names because they’re the ones I could actually hear. As with Vowws, Poppy’s voice was so low in the mix that only on rare occasions did her vocals cut through the instrumentation. After the perfect audio of the two shows I went to in the 2010s (Sparks and Die Mannequin) it was a bit of a letdown—and since later research has revealed that Vowws’ lyrics actually are audible on their records, it seems to be mainly the venue’s fault. That said, though, it does seem pretty clear that Poppy’s beautiful vocals owe more than a little to studio sweetening. Her voice is like blackberries. Blackberries without sugar aren’t particularly palatable. With sugar, they’re scrumptious. But that doesn’t make the sugar the hero—you can’t pour sugar on a turnip and call it dessert. You need something latently amazing for the sweetening to bring out. Poppy herself has described her voice as “very soft”, and it may be so breathy on many of her songs just because when you crank up the volume on such a soft voice you get a lot of breath along with it. That may be the type of voice that does better in the studio than in the Great American Music Hall.
In any case, here’s the setlist:
“Concrete”: Right off the bat I found myself torn: on the one hand, for the first time I could see Poppy rather than a digital representation of her, but on the other, the drumming on this song is way more interesting to watch than the singing. I figured I’d have plenty of time to watch Poppy, but only this song required that a hundred and fifty different parts of the kit be hit each second. I watched the drummer. Also, as recorded this song fades out, but at the show it built up to a big finish. I guess it’s hard to fade out live.
“Bloodmoney”: For this one I did watch Poppy. (I guess I haven’t mentioned what she looked like: she had her newly brown hair up in a double bun, and wore a leotard and tights underneath a gigantic dark sport coat.) It occurs to me that in the past I have tried to show my students the speed of cultural transformation in the 1960s by playing them “I Want to Hold Your Hand” followed by “Tomorrow Never Knows” and pointing out that the second song came out only two years after the first. Well, this may not reflect the larger culture this time, but here we go again. In 2017 Poppy was singing, “I’m softer than a daisy”; in 2019 she was starring in a video in which she beats assailants to death while bellowing, “BEG FOR FORGIVENESS FROM JESUS THE CHRIST!”. That’s a pretty momentous couple of years! Anyway, given that for me at least it’s the subtle touches layered in with the bludgeoning that makes this such a great song, it lost a little something when those touches weren’t there.
“Scary Mask”: I had wondered whether Poppy would play anything from Choke. I guess it stands to reason that she’d pick this one, since it’s closest to the sound of the new album. It turned out to be the only one, which was a little disappointing given what the next two songs were:
“X”: Again, this is noteworthy as the seed from which I Disagree sprang, but compared to the songs on that album, it seems half-baked. The moshers liked it, though.
“Play Destroy”: Kind of a weird choice, because this isn’t even entirely Poppy’s song—it’s a collaboration with the self-styled “ADD musician” Claire Boucher, a.k.a. Grimes (now better known for her collaboration with Elon Musk in making a fetus). Perhaps the thinking was that this song was a gateway that brought Grimes fans into Poppy fandom, and some of those people might be at the show and might riot if they didn’t hear this song. Or something.
“Fill the Crown”: The first time Poppy has played this song live! …but it didn’t much feel like a live song due to all the pre-recorded sections. I was kind of hoping I’d finally get to hear a version in which Poppy did both vocal parts, but no luck. Also, instead of ending with a return to the stuttery bit it cut off pretty abruptly, which wasn’t the best.
“Am I a Girl?”: I knew of this song before I heard it, since it’s the title track from Poppy’s second album; based on what I knew about her at that point, I thought the question was going to be “Am I a girl or am I a robot?”. When it actually turned out to be about androgyny, I was like “whut”—this isn’t Annie Lennox, it’s Poppy! She’d made a career out of performing femininity about as unequivocally as possible! The San Francisco crowd loved it, though.
“Anything Like Me”: Poppy had said in an interview that this was the song she was most looking forward to playing on tour, and here she was doing so for the first time… and, yeah, you could tell this one meant something to her. The vocals were reasonably audible on this one and she put more of a sneer into the verses than she did in the recorded version. This was a winner. And I think it also demonstrates the thing I always say about dark music, including earlier in this article: sure, she put some hostility into this song, but it was hard to miss that in her unguarded moments on stage, Poppy was beaming. That’s what this music does. It turns the darker end of the emotional spectrum into happiness—the sort of happiness that puts regular happiness to shame. I never went very far with my old bands. But ask me what my happiest memories are, and most of them are of playing music.
“Nothing I Need”: This was the first song to sound better live, probably because the drums were so prominent in the mix that even though the drummer tried to lay off, it still sounded like a percussion-driven song.
“All the Things She Said”: Naturally this had me riveted—a new song!—but even though it was pretty clearly a cover, I didn’t recognize it. That is to say, I didn’t recognize the music. When I learned what it was, of course I recognized the title—it was a big enough pop culture phenomenon in its day that I even referred to it in Narcolepsy!—but apparently I hadn’t ever actually heard it. In any case, as a concert segment, it was successful. In retrospect, I can’t help but wonder whether there was a message there, given that, as I understand it, the members of the original band, t.A.T.u., were aspiring singers who had been recruited by a production company that required them to make all their public appearances in character…!
“Sit/Stay”: Sounded pretty much exactly like on the record.
“Sick of the Sun”: Poppy’s vocals kind of disappeared on this one. It’s got some high notes in it, and it doesn’t seem like she can hit those at volume.
“Don’t Go Outside”: I don’t think this was an intimate enough venue for the quiet parts of the song to work—like, even the fact that Poppy was standing up instead of sitting in a chair like Kurt Cobain did in the “Unplugged” show seemed kind of weird to me somehow. The cymbals also erased big chunks of the vocals. On the flip side, the loud parts of the song made a lot more sense! Those arena-rock solos seem a little out of place on the record, but in a live show they fit.
Then came the part where the band pretends to leave before coming back for an encore—in this case, there wasn’t even much mystery about what the encore would consist of, since two songs from the new album had gone missing:
“Bite Your Teeth”: Again, this one sounded pretty much exactly like the recorded version.
“I Disagree”: This one didn’t. This song is all about the chorus, but without the studio sweetening, it’s just a really good chorus instead of an all-time great one. The bridge was a bit off because Poppy’s head voice was just about gone by this point (though when she dipped down an octave for the next verse, it turned out that her chest voice was still going strong—maybe now that she’s no longer performing as a high-voiced pop-bot she’ll write future songs in a lower register). What really struck me, though, was that when Poppy was done singing, she blew kisses to the crowd and left… but the band kept on playing, well past the point when the recorded version of the song ends. I don’t think I would have wanted the extra jamming on the record, but live it was great.
And that got me wondering. As I left that show, I didn’t feel like I’d just watched a solo act. That was a five-piece, and everyone got a turn in the spotlight. It reminded me of how back in the ’70s and ’80s, the members of Blondie got so annoyed at people referring to the blonde frontwoman as “Blondie” that they turned their correction into a slogan: the singer is Deborah Harry. “Blondie” is a BAND. I have no idea what might happen with Poppy next; after this many swerves in her career, maybe she goes back to pop, or switches to that hippety hop the kids are so nutty about, or, hell—she’s from Nashville, so maybe she puts out a country album. But maybe she sticks with this kind of music, but as the next step in discarding the character she used to play, the next time around, she tells the music press, “No, no. My name is Moriah Pereira. ‘Poppy’ is a BAND.”
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