Billie Eilish is on the Hit Me Hard and Soft world tour and played Rogers Arena on Tuesday night. Here’s what happened
Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
What Was I Made For?
Recommended Videos
It’s a question asked in the Oscar-winning song of the same name from the film Barbie. The answer was given time and time again last night at Rogers Arena by the tune’s singer, Billie Eilish.
She is an artist made for making some of the most engagingly original music in contemporary pop and delivering it a performance style that manages to be both transfixing and often rather dorfy.
Touring in support of her third full-length album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, Eilish offered up a career-spanning show that got off to a cool start as she appeared from a flash of fog floating above the stage and projection screen assembly in a flash of white light.
Seriously, name one other several Grammy-winning female artist who hits the stage in an oversized Yohji Yamamoto toque, vintage #80 Southpole football jersey, jams that would be big on an NBA player and some choice black and red kicks? This is someone who wants you to listen and also be as natural as possible in their presentation.
It’s disarming and unique style which goes far deeper than comfy stage gear.
It is in the DNA of her recorded output, which can range from deeply dark squalls of sound like Bury a Friend to the silky smooth ballad Your Power and even the addictive party Charli xcx cover Guess.
A packed arena is chanting along to every lyric from the opening line of you wanna guess the colour of my underwear right down to the try it, bite it, lick it, spit it chorus sounds more than a tad naughty. But when the performer is laughing through those lyrics with a smile a mile wide, it turns any seduction on its head becomes a super rad party jam.
Particularly when bathed in swaths of neon green lasers etching patterns across the arena as the in-the-round stage shifts shades to compliment the colours. While the long rectangle with two sunken spaces on either end for the six-piece band to hunker down in looked simple, it proved to be delightfully entertaining with a central rising platform swing where Eilish could float above the audience, staircases to move from side to side and out into the barricades around the crowd and focus sections on either end that served as B-stages for both Everything I Wanted and a piano medley of lovely/ idontwannabeyouanymore / ocean eyes.
The set list flow kept fans energized from the opening notes of CHIHIRO to the closer Birds of a Feather, but it wasn’t without some sound challenges.
As is so often the case with bass-heavy EDM-style drops and pulsing beats in a stadium, there can be considerable challenges in getting a consistently clean mix and there were times when that proved to be the case throughout the evening. Mixing a show that goes from the swooping synths of Therefore I am to the near-choral vocal looping of When the Party’s Over is going to be challenging.
Having a house full of folks who know every single lyric and singalong with them also makes the case that some minor sonic disruptions are no big thing. In the big picture, they weren’t.
Fans got a typically personal performance from an artist who has changed with every concert here, growing more and more interactive with the crowd and confident in her delivery. When she mentioned that she hoped she wasn’t bombing due to a case of laryngitis last week, the applause made it clear there was no problem.
Even when Eilish mentioned that she had always held a special fondness for Vancouver, which is the kind of line you could take right out of concert banter 101, it instead made for a nice, real story.
At age 15, she had come up here for a choir tour. Now she was back performing with two friends named Jane and Eva who had been singing with her since they were all 14.
The only downer of the evening was for whoever tossed a giant red bra onstage with a message of love for Finneas scribbled on it. Eilish’s brother, co-writer and producer Finneas O’Connell has been in her touring band for her previous performances here.
This time around, he wasn’t.