Kate Tempest brought 'Chaos' to dazzling life in NYC (pics, review)
Kate Tempest wrapped up her North American tour in NYC on Thursday night (4/13) at Le Poisson Rouge. After sharing a few stories about how coming to NYC in the early ’00s as a hip-hop-obsessed teenager changed her life, she set up the show which would be her and her band performing Let Them Eat Chaos in full, no encore. And then it began: a dizzying, dazzling, heartbreaking, inspired, flat-out amazing hourlong performance that held that packed house entranced the entire time.
It was as much a one-woman show as a concert, given the nature of Let Them Eat Chaos, with Tempest as narrator and sole actor in a play about the only seven people awake at 4:18 AM on a particular block (here, slightly reset to NYC from the album’s London setting). The highlight of the show, without a doubt, is the fiery “Europe is Lost” (which she performed on Fallon) that sums up a lot of the world’s problems and hypocrisies in one eight-minute tour-de-force, asking “What’re we gonna do to wake up?” — a question and mantra repeated throughout the night. (WAKE UP was also emblazoned in giant letters on the t-shirts at the merch booth.) Her band, which did not include producer Dan Carey this time around, were tight (and loud!), groovy and brought the Chaos when needed. A knockout show.
Brooklynite Latasha Alcindor (“But you can call me L.A.”) made for a nice appetizer for Kate’s main course, better as a rapper than as a singer but showing lots of promise. Pictures of both artists in the gallery above.
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photos by Amanda Hatfield
