Mitski @ Gorilla, Manchester, 19 Sep

One of her generation's most cutting songwriters, Mitski states her case at a taut and provocative tour opener in Manchester

Live Review by Joe Goggins | 25 Sep 2018

Is Mitski the cowboy? In a host of interviews that prefaced her superlative fifth record, Be the Cowboy, last month, she insisted that the title was a joke that stuck; as she told Rolling Stone, it came from a long-held fixation with “the ideal of swaggering, [not] caring.” The casting off, in other words, of any expectations. Anybody who’d been hoping for a radical departure on that LP, based on those comments, would have been disappointed; it’s a razor-sharp and airtight collection of pop songs that is still very much identifiable as Mitski. On stage, though, there are signs of a genuine sea change.

Suddenly, there’s choreography. No longer is she contained to the three square feet behind the microphone, and nor is she chained to the guitar all night. Mitski now leads a five-piece outfit and, four songs in, she’s already forcefully laying claim to the role that you’d assume she’d already earned by default; that of frontwoman. She paces up and down with palpable unease as she howls out the words to First Love / Late Spring. On the built-to-be-together A Pearl and Thursday Girl she throws out juddery dance moves.

Ultimately though, what makes this show special is precisely the same reason that the room is packed out – Mitski’s uniquely incisive lyrical perspective as a woman of colour in the western world. No wonder the painfully incisive likes of Happy and Your Best American Girl are met with such an emotional outpouring, and a word too for the gorgeous paean to lost love that is Two Slow Dancers for the encore. Mitski’s self-styled frost put distance between herself and the audience on previous Manchester visits, but there was real evidence of a thaw tonight. Good timing, given that she’s inching ever closer to the pantheon of her generation’s great songwriters.

https://mitski.com/