MITSKI CASTED A MESMERIZING SPELL OVER KINGS THEATRE

The mystical mesmerizer Mitski stopped in NYC for a stunning seven straight sold out show run on her North American tour supporting a truly impressive new album This Land is Inhospitable and So Are We. A siege that included four shows at the lavish Manhattan opera house Beacon Theater, followed by three at the equally opulent Kings Theatre in Brooklyn, and her Big Apple takeover was made even more massive with a gallery art show and pop-up shop in Chinatown. Her undeniable appeal is truly awe-striking, as I observed the crowds she attracted included an impressive cross-generational swath of people with both enthusiastic children and grey-haired aficionados from all corners of ethnic and socioeconomic life, and they all gathering in mass numbers to be bewitched by her truly magical performances. We were lucky enough to get into her second to last Brooklyn show, and what I witnessed was an otherworldly conjuring of pure spell-binding magic.

Kings Theatre

Opening the show was the LA-based female folk singer Sunny War, who has a bit of a country twang, which is not surprising considering she comes from Nashville, but I also detected some diff of soul classics, and finely done up with a cool punk-ish rawness. She played in duo form with a good friend by the name of Alan Eckert on drums, and the stripped-down sound she produced was stirring with a plucky mastering of the fingerstyle guitar with a superb clawhammer technique. She had an extremely shy demeanor as she nervously admitted she was writing love songs even though she had never been truly in love, but she had a lonely presence in her music that made me think that wasn’t completely true.

Sunny War

Mitski started her set playing “Everyone” from 2022’s Laurel Hell album from inside a cylindrical curtain that rose into the sky, and her backlit shadow produced a mysterious allure that would be an overwhelming presence that would pervade her entire show. After the drapes rose and the true magician was revealed, she occupied the raised cylindrical platform in the middle of the stage all by herself through most of the set, as she mystified and bewitched with her smoothly sensual movements that spoke of her talent and expertise as a performance artist of the highest degree. Her stage presence was very seductive, but I love that in never got there in a grossly sexual way, but she would instead lure you in with all the haunting presence of a hypnotic siren luring you into the rocks of her creations, but her performance would never let you go into to that total lucid heaven, as it liked to keep you present enough to further play with. She had a great rapport with the audience, like when she talked about how the theater had been thought to be haunted, and how it had shuttered for nearly 30 years before it was remodeled, and how she thought the ghosts must had been extremely lonely, which I found to be a great metaphor for her strangely transcendental music. The stage set was a sparse arrangement, as she was surrounded by an extensive backing band back who all remained practically unseen in the shadows, and she did so much with this minimalist setup, and she had nothing in her little circle but some chairs that she used to surprising effectiveness throughout her show as she rearranged and stacked them like she was and ghostly poltergeist herself, and waltzing with beams of light in a dance that Brought goosebumps all over my body, and generally being a mesmerizing performance artist with every bewitching movement she made. She played some of her best known songs like “I Bet on Losing Dogs”, “First Love/Late Spring”, “My Love Mine All Mine”, “Nobody”, and “Washing Machine Heart,” but it all felt new with every song feeling like it would wash right into the next song, and second of silence you could hear a pin drop as she had everyone holding their breath for every spellbinding word and movement. I found her performance of “Words of a Shooting Stars” especially stunning, as she wondered through a bunch of broken mirror pieces floating in air and sent each piece into the heavens with a gentle touch which proved to be a very very much how I felt as I floated out of the theater after the show.