The crowd
The doors opened at 7 p.m., and we arrived around 7:05.  There was al­ready a long line along the sidewalk, which allowed us to get a look at our fellow concertgoers.  They did not look like your stereotypical metal crowd.  There were families escort­ing tween daughters, some forty-plus types, and quite a few solo wo­men, but for the most part the crowd seemed to consist largely of mild-mannered couples, the men with glasses, the women with rib­bons in their hair.  Ellie and I turned to each other and I could see the relief on her face.  We remarked simultaneously:

Me: “Hey, these people look like us!”

Ellie: “Hey, these people look like dweebs!”

This is not to say that the crowd posed no problems.  Due to Ellie’s fear of being caught in a mosh pit and my fear of being deafened, we found spots in the very back⁠—which had the additional benefit that we didn’t have to worry about the people behind us, because there were none.  But we soon discovered that to the right of us were a couple of vapers, so we had to move.  But moving along with us was a large oaf who spent every song flailing around, blocking Ellie’s sight­lines and gradually encroaching on her personal space; I had to step forward and take up an anti-trampling stance to make sure he didn’t clock her with an elbow or shoulder blade.  Eventually Ellie found a spot close to the exit that he couldn’t follow us to and we watched the rest of the show from there, but that was only the last three songs.

(Oh, I forgot to mention: while we were in line, I saw that a bunch of the cops and Fillmore staff were poring over page after page of pho­tos labeled “POPPY SECURITY THREATS”.  Depressing.  How fucked up is it that there’s a thick dossier of evil monsters who would men­ace one of the last remaining sources of joy in our dying world?)

The venue
Another one of those large rooms with a flat floor and very little seat­ing, all of it with poor angles on the stage and all of it reserved in ad­vance.  This made the stage hard to see, which Poppy and the musi­cians dealt with by locating themselves on tall risers.  Sound quality was like that at the UC Theatre: guitars were swallowed up, so the songs were essentially reduced to vocals, drums, and bass.  The main difference was that the bass was turned way up.  There’s a bit in Ready, Okay! in which Allen describes a “sound that I could feel knocking chips off my vertebrae”, and that was the case here: it was bone-rattling.  Ellie liked that, saying that part of the concert experi­ence was feeling the music in your body.  But that bass was amped up to the point that people were probably feeling it in their bodies in Pacific Heights.

The opening act
Chinese American Bear, a dream pop band consisting of a married couple from Spokane and a touring drummer.  Their gimmick was that a bit over half their lyrics were in Mandarin.  The singer asked, “Who here speaks Chinese?!” and seemed surprised when there was almost no response⁠—I guess maybe they’re used to headlining their own shows, and audiences who specifically seek out songs with lyrics in Mandarin are going to be largely composed of Mandarin speakers?  The singer also described what each song was about before launching into it, and the offerings were on such topics as “academically de­manding parents”, “visiting Beijing”, and “dumplings, our favorite food”. 

Poppy’s band
I guess the “So Mean” video was a one-off, because Poppy is back to making the band members wear disguises again⁠—ninja masks this time.  She also didn’t introduce them by name, only as “the guitarist” and whatnot.  I assume the drummer is still the awesome Ralph Alexander, but she’s changed guitarists and bassists a few times so I don’t know who’s on this tour.  I’ll update this if I find out.

Poppy’s outfit
She had on a pink dress with a top half like a drum majorette’s outfit and a bottom half that consisted of a huge bustle skirt with the front cut away to show off the entirety of her legs and some more besides.  (She had on some sort of white bicycle shorts underneath.)  After writing the above I discovered that someone had posted a picture, so here you go:

The set list

• “Have You Had Enough?” (2024):  Skipping the opening verses and starting with the chorus.

• “Bloodmoney” (2019):  This got the biggest cheer from the crowd. 

• “Sit/Stay” (2020):  The arrangement of this has changed a bit since 2020.

• “V.A.N.” (2024):  Unexpected!  This is a Bad Omens stand-alone single from about fourteen months ago.  Not quite as shocking as if she’d played “Switch”, but a pleasant surprise.

• “The Cost of Giving Up” (2024):  I later saw that she had per­formed this one on Jimmy Kimmel’s show the night before.

• “Anything Like Me” (2020):  Again skipping the opening verses.

• “Crystallized” (2024):  The first non-metal track on the new album.

• “Vital” (2024):  Following the album sequence.

• “The Center’s Falling Out” (2024):  The screamiest track on the new album; I didn’t expect her to do this one live.  It’s one of Ellie’s two favorites from the new record, so she was pumped about it.

• “Scary Mask” (2019):  The oldest track played this time around, again with a new arrangement.  That means that her 2018 main­stays (“Am I a Girl?”, “Play Destroy”, and “X”) have apparent­ly aged out of the lineup.

• “I Disagree” (2019):  As at the 2022 show, this suffered from the loss of the guitar in the sound mix.

• “Push Go” (2024):  Poppy put up a video in which a doll version of herself asks, “What if I make a mistake?”  The only “mistake” I picked up during this concert happened in this song, when she reached for a high note and it just wasn’t there⁠—it’s not that she was off pitch, but it seemed like she just hit her passaggio and nothing came out.  But as the voice in the video explains, that’s how you know it’s live!  (Her voice was otherwise strong⁠—on the drive over I mentioned to Ellie that I was glad we were seeing her on the first night of the tour rather than after two months of screaming.)

• “Bite Your Teeth” (2020):  New arrangement.

• “Concrete” (2019):  The first Poppy song I ever heard.

• “Surviving on Defiance” (2024):  Ellie’s other favorite from the new record.  That was ostensibly the end of the set, but almost immediately came the encore:

• “They’re All Around Us” (2024):  This is the one the tour is named after, so it did seem unlikely that it would go missing.

• “New Way Out” (2024):  The last song played; I had guessed that it would be the first.  It was the first single from the album, announcing Poppy’s new musical direction following her 2023 glitch-pop album Zig.

And what jumped out at me the most about this show was that Poppy sure seemed to want to put all of 2021, 2022, and 2023 into the mem­ory hole.  Zig wasn’t my favorite, but she didn’t do a headlining tour to support it, so I thought there might be at least a couple of Zig numbers in the show, but no.  Nothing from Flux⁠—not even “Her”, which disappointed me on Ellie’s behalf.  Nothing from the Eat or Stagger EPs.  But so be it⁠—I came to see Negative Spaces get played live, and out of the twelve non-interstitial songs on the record, Poppy played nine of them.  So I guess I’ll close this article the same way she closed her show:

“New Way Out” (Poppy, 2024)

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