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Live Review: Robyn at ACL Live
At ACL Live Thursday night, Robyn looked and sounded like she comes from a world where the New Wave movie “Liquid Sky” was historical fact (call it Earth-Ziggy), where fembots became sentient and learned how to grow up without growing old.
Some background: You may or may not remember the Swedish, former teen popster Robyn from her 1997 album “Robyn in Here,” (the hit was “Show Me Love”). It was as state-of-the-art as the Backstreet Boys or Britney; she became huge on her native continent and somewhat big here.
She left Jive in 2004, then bravely rebooted her career, indulging a new-found infatuation with electronic music. Her 2005 album “Robyn” was killer - clubs, especially gay clubs, worshiped it, as did Europe, but the American market barely noticed.
2010 was even better, two mini albums (“Body Talk, Pt. 1” and “2”) that combined to form the blipping, catchy, touching “Body Talk,” one of the year’s truly great albums.
On “Body Talk,” Robyn is smart enough to know what to take from her teen years - Swedish pop savant Max Martin co-wrote the excellent single “Time Machine” - but also fascinated by the emotional and musical parameters of mechanized disco. It’s music that sounds from 20 minutes in the future and the past simultaneously.
Once again, only dance clubs seemed to get it - it peaked at no. 142 on the Billboard Top 200 and the world may never understand why. Robyn is that oddest of ducks - the cult-level pop queen.
Which is perhaps why tickets to the truly stellar ACL Live show were only $15 and the 2700-count room was not sold out. Everyone who was not there: You lose.
Flanked by two keyboard players and dancing in front of two drummers, a constantly-dancing Robyn delivered a set that was both brilliantly high energy and intriguingly stripped down.
Even the stage was spare - the only props were two oversized pinwheels and a few bananas (!) she ate in the middle of the set (the latter was greeted with wild cheers from the extremely male audience).
There were no guitars, no basses, nothing that could be construed as organic, except for the drummers, who usually played in unison but who occasionally broke into complimentary polyrhythms. This was pure fembot music, except the fembot looked dressed for a workout (in platform sneakers).
Taking the stage to “Time Machine,” Robyn cranked through her dazzling dance-pop with ecstatic efficiency as ACL Live proved its worth again - the harsh, electronic club music sounded stellar.
In front of a packed, worshipful floor section, Robyn’s theme was loneliness, from the “Fembot” who “needs love too” to “Dancing On My Own.” She told us “Love Kills” even when it’s (or perhaps because it’s) “Indestructible.” On the aching “Call Your Girlfriend,” she can’t figure out if she’s the new one or the old one, and the moving “Hang With Me,” with its sparkly, music-of-the-spheres synths, wants to just be friends.
When she folded a bit of Abba’s “Dancing Queen” into a spare, show-stopping “Show Me Love,” she reminded you that this fembot deserves all the love we can give her.
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