Concert Review: FKA Twigs at Factory Town

I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I arrived at Factory Town this past Saturday for the first date of FKA Twigs’ new “Body High” tour, and sometimes that’s half the fun of attending a show. The avant-garde pop artist has an impeccable critical reputation, and a tour opener at one of South Florida’s most interesting venues felt like reason enough to make the drive down to Miami. That this wasn’t going to be the type of show I usually attend was clear before the music even started: the crowd, young and visibly amped, looked more like they were at Club Space than a typical audience for a show driven by Pitchfork “Best New Music” accolades.

Factory Town itself was not what I expected either. The only other time I was on those grounds—about 18 months ago, for a King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard show—the setup was significantly larger, occupying a different part of the same outdoor industrial space. Saturday’s show used a smaller footprint, but what it lacked in size it made up for in density: I’d imagine somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 people were packed tightly into the open-air space, a turnout that surprised me for this show; clearly I’d been underestimating the artist’s reach.

FKA Twigs took the stage just after 9, outfitted in red headgear and performing on what seemed to be a bed, signaling early the performance-art direction the evening would take. Full disclosure: I took in the show from the back of the crowd, so some of the evening’s visual nuances may have been lost on me, but there were multiple costume changes and at least a few different set items circulated on and off the stage. From the jump, the artist’s confidence, raw emotion, and excellent voice were all at the forefront, and it was clear that the show was going to lean heavily on spectacle. Backup dancers first arrived during the second song, and the troupe eventually grew to a cast of six performers sharing the stage with her for the heavily choreographed performance.

What followed was, depending on one’s perspective, either an admirable and ambitious multimedia event or a show with a muddied narrative and glaring lack of connective tissue. The crowd seemed to find it mostly the former: when a hype man emerged early on to pivot the show into a few minutes of a full rave, the audience responded with more enthusiasm than they had for some of the more melodramatic singer-songwriter moments. To me, the transitions just felt jarring, the seams between art-pop, rave, and performance art never quite hidden well enough to create a coherent experience.

But the moments that worked really worked. A choreographed sequence in which Twigs appeared to slash her dancers with a sword—blood splatter appearing on the screens behind them as they fell—was stunning, and the show’s most musically interesting stretches were, to my ears, its loudest and most dissonant ones, the moments when the few visible musicians pushed the production toward something that more closely recalled Nine Inch Nails than anything on pop radio. When the show demanded attention musically rather than just visually, it earned it.

I was clearly not the target audience that FKA Twigs put in countless hours preparing to debut this new show for on Saturday night, but thankfully the right crowd found its way there for its premiere. For the few people who may have attended expecting a more straightforward show, the Body High tour was a maximalist provocation that blurred the lines between concert and rave, sometimes for better and occasionally for worse.

SET LIST: