Melanie Martinez
3Arena, Dublin
★★★★☆
Not many true eccentrics are left in music, so kudos to the former Voice USA contestant Melanie Martinez for bringing the weird back to pop. The opening night of the singer’s European tour unfolds as an avalanche of disorienting imagery and nightmarish costuming that tumbles out like Hieronymus Bosch doing Teletubbies or Greta Gerwig’s Barbie remade as a horror movie.
This fascinating concert is a step through the looking glass into a phantasmagorical rumpus room that hits like too many Gummy Bear sweets gobbled all at once. Glistening fairy wings, nightmarish playground rides and a hospital bed on wheels upon which dancers restrain the 29-year-old New Yorker are just some of the standout moments. The two-hour set also borrows a trick from Taylor Swift’s Eras tour with back-to-back performances of Martinez’s three studio albums – records united by sheer eye-pop outlandishness.
On The Voice, Martinez always sang with an oversized child’s bow on her head. It was an evocation of childhood that struck an unsettling note when paired with her Cruella de Vil contrasting black and blond hair. (Today the look is black and strawberry red.)
So it’s telling that such imagery has found its audience in actual children. The seated section of 3Arena is packed with under-12s up slightly too late for a school night. Much like every preteen’s favourite franchise, Five Nights at Freddy’s, something about Martinez’s trick-or-treat vibes seems to register with kids, drawn perhaps to the hint of grown-up danger that shimmers around her work. Or maybe they just like all the bizarre fashion choices and candy-cane melodies. It would take a child psychologist to unpack it all.
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Martinez doesn’t stint on the hits. She starts with the title track from her 2016 debut, Crybaby, a project she has described as channelling a “fairy tale version of herself”. She next plunges into Sippy Cup and Playdate, songs set in a sort of hellscape nursery. Forget Lady Gaga: this is Lady GooGooGaaGaa.
An interlude follows during which her dancers dally and dry ice floods the stage. Martinez returns sitting on a bus and then an oversized see-saw for a selection from her K-12 album. (K-12 is the American equivalent of primary school.) She has a clear, sharp voice, and her music has some of the goth-pop veneer of mainstream artists such as Billie Eilish or Lorde. But her conjuring of school-age rites of passage is decidedly surreal, as if the singer is flashing back to a fairground-mirror version of her childhood.
The performance comes into its own in the final third. Martinez delves into Portals, her “reset” LP, which broke a five-year silence and is themed around the idea of resurrection. (A global hit, it peaked at three in the Irish charts.)
The segment features Martinez in a prosthetic mask that makes her look like Simon Cowell’s idea of Dobby the Elf from Harry Potter. But the disguise doesn’t obscure her fine voice on Battle of the Larynx, a song accompanied by jets of flame that draws on the conflict in her personal life.
Confetti fills the room as she encores with the wonky power-ballad Womb. While the colours swirl and wink, she addresses the crowd for the first time. Thanking her fans for coming out, she asks them to join together to shout “Free Palestine” on the count of three. It is a sprinkling of politics at the end of an evening that brims with big pop moments and has the uncanny quality of a nursery rhyme whispered by a monster under your bed.
