Click here to see Edwina Hay’s GREAT shots of last night (more will be added later)

Last night VV Brown returned to New York not as an opening act, but as the triumphant headliner at Manhattan’s Bowery Ballroom. Her recent tour opening for Little Dragon, doing a string of promotional radio, magazine article and free shows has given her wider exposure that her artistry deserves.

This additional work was visible in the crowd that came out to see her was quite different from the crowd that came to see her free at Brooklyn Bowl. For one, it generally skewed a bit younger and mostly female, but there were also the pop boys and a handful of older audience members as well as opposed to the nearly uniform mid-20s early 30s hip urban crowd at Brooklyn Bowl.

So her marketing team is doing its job, was she able to maintain?

Let’s talk about the great opening acts.

Class Actress does synthpop that’s less Vangelis and more Moroder. Lots of online music journalism seems to concentrate electronic pop music firmly in the early 1980s, so there’s a lot of the same names that get thrown around for band comparisons. Yet watching Elizabeth Harper, she struck me less like Madonna and more like a moody Donna Summer, one who got her start after AIDS and hubris ravaged the disco scene rather than before but tinged with the crystalline voice of Debbie Harry in full on “Heart of Glass” mode.

The synthlines are 5 AM dance floor dirty, and the soundscape is fleshed out with effects that recall Italo Disco and Suicide (yes, really). The beats are pretty much serviceable, but the real story is the interplay between Elizabeth Harper’s emotive range that calls forth despair and desire in equal measure before it suppresses everything to be disinterested and disaffected. Melancholy melodies for modern monsters.

On stage, Elizabeth has great stagecraft. She would wander the stage, striking iconic poses in time to the music, as each stab of pain in the lyrics was reflected in her angled and precise movements. Wandering to the front of the stage to emphasize the emotions and making it back to her keyboard in time to finger the flourishes that add weight to her voice as the emotions of the songs swelled to climax. She did this so effortlessly that these calculated movements took me by surprise each time.

There’s a wet, dark streets sort of quality to the tunes. Late, lost nights, lonely sidewalks, make up smeared, regrets, regrets, regrets. Yet there is also a kind of joy of life in these songs. That these dark nights will lead to brighter days. Class Actress is getting a lot of hype, and it’s largely well deserved. I look forward to seeing her again and I need to get the EP.

Dear Amanda Warner AKA MDNR, I want to go live in your sock drawer. As an electronic musician performing live, you do everything damn near right. Your songs are incredible, calling to mind turn of the century house and party techno before everything went became fucked by the twin curse of electro and mnml that wiped out fun music like herpes in a hot tub. Expansive, bass heavy driving dance music produced live and each song mixed into the next with audio reactive visuals?

Fuck, girl. How did I just find out about you last night? I can’t really say much about what was going on stage because I was too busy texting my friends in DC about you.
I’d like you to teach a course to every other New York “dance” artist out there on how to work a stage. How to use Ableton to sequence your set to that each tracks flows to the next. How to use visuals. Basically, just how to “be.” Get them out. Get them out of music venues and get them into raves. Teach them how people fucking dance. How DJs make people dance. It’s not with three-minute songs, 10-second pauses, followed by another three-minute song.

You did all of this with a 102-degree fever? Fuck. Just. Fuck. I am almost angry that I had never seen you before. I am almost angrier that you’re not performing again in the foreseeable future.

I knew that VV Brown was going to be amazing when we got up front and I saw on stage the stands for sheet music. Horn line. The one thing I was wishing for that would really cement VV Brown’s retropop sensibilities when I first saw her at Brooklyn Bowl and here they were.

Taking to the stage with an expanded line up of seven members, the original bassist, guitarist, drummer and now horns, every foot of Bowery Ballroom’s stage was packed with instruments. In addition to the new horn line, the expected VV Brown table of instruments and gong, sitting off to the right, was an electric piano and microphone.

To my understanding, she didn’t have a habit of playing piano on stage, concentrating just on the pop numbers, the Drake cover and the genre bent rearrangements of other songs. So this was certainly going to be an interesting show all around.

Unlike the previous show, VV Brown came out in a resplendent costume. She wore a white ribbed dress with gold lame belt that called to mind Egypt and a feathered mask referencing Brazil’s Carnaval. Immediately she launched into the feel good retro tinged pop songs that everyone in the crowd knew by heart, speaking to the level of fandom she’s inspired already, and to the catchiness of her music.

VV Brown’s set list was pretty standard, playing if not the full album, then nearly the whole thing. She even sat down at the piano to play the album’s title track “Travelling Like the Light” in a pure piano version. Stripped of the studio additions of backing tracks, drums, and effects; her naked voice and dexterous piano playing displayed the musical skill in a way that wasn’t visible in the live shows before. It’s one thing to say “I made this album by myself” and it’s another to actually prove there’s musical talent behind black pop starlet she could easily be.

Her warmth and charisma were on full display last night, as she played a long show, with encore and then hung around to sign autographs and talk to fans minutes after leaving the stage.

I have high hopes for VV Brown in the future. I think if she can suppress the slickness of the computer generated pop and continue to embrace the dirt of human instrumentation, I think that she would be more successful musically, but then the desire to balance that against the market’s need for perfection must be strong. My fear, I guess is that instead of getting something daring that continues thematically from the first album we’ll get It’s Not Me, It’s You.