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Celeb News: Lady Gaga iTunes Festival Reviews
Member Since: 7/9/2010
Posts: 42,506
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Lady Gaga - Review
4/5 stars
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Half an hour before Lady Gaga is due onstage – and an hour before she actually turns up – the queue outside the Roundhouse stretches away from the venue and a startling distance down Camden High Street. Some of the fans who have turned up to hear the singer debut songs from her forthcoming third album, Artpop, have even gone to the trouble of dressing up as per the instructions she issued on Twitter.
The gig has been dubbed Swinefest after a harrowing new song which, judging by its lengthy and emotional introduction, has its roots in an abusive relationship.
Gaga's instructions began straightforwardly, by suggesting the crowd ape the mermaid outfit she's recently been spotted in, then grew progressively weirder. Where, you wondered, does one source a "bedazzled pig nose" or indeed "paint-coloured dreadlocks for securing 'under the sea' Boticelli-Punk accessories"? Does TK Maxx do "Bowie magician garb"? Finally, she announced that people should come in "clothes you don't mind getting covered in live art".
The gig itself is alternately gripping and slightly maddening. There's something intriguing about the way it deconstructs the standard pop show, with the various costume and wig changes taking place onstage, in front of the crowd. Equally, it's hard not to think she's slightly overselling the album's concept.
She claims it's her dream that "art and pop should come together" as if she's the first person in history to think of linking the two, which research suggests isn't actually the case. Still, she can certainly claim originality in her presentation: the Who, Roxy Music and the Velvet Underground certainly didn't do their stuff while wearing a G-string covered in seashells, dodging stuffed pigs thrown by the crowd.
In addition, for all her lengthy soliloquies about how radical her new material is, you're struck by the creeping sense that it's not that different from the rest of the charts. Swine's continual surges from impassioned piano balladry into electronic noise are striking, but elsewhere are the kind of musical influences that everybody else appears to be influenced by at the moment: Jewels and Drugs offers a plethora of guest appearances from rappers over a grinding dubstep rhythm, and elsewhere there's a hint of gauzy 80s R&B.
But that doesn't mean they're bad songs – Manicure in particular sounds like a huge hit in waiting – and it's hard to pick too many holes in what's happening onstage, which is frequently both ridiculous and ridiculously entertaining. Within minutes of her arrival, she has waved a knife about, feigned a nervous breakdown, been manhandled into a giant cage and hoisted into the air, then laid on the ground kicking her legs in the air, a piece of choreography designed to leave anyone old enough to remember Tiswas thinking wistfully of the show's attempt to launch a dance craze called the Dying Fly.
Later, she sings from within a large, illuminated egg, and engages in a routine with white-clad dancers wearing pig's heads and wielding guns that spray paint over the stage: proof that when it comes to making a mainstream pop gig feel like an event, Lady Gaga really is as far ahead of her peers as she thinks she is.
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REVIEW: Applause star kicks off iTunes Festival at The Roundhouse, Camden...
Lady Gaga was the first of thirty acts to perform at this year's iTunes Festival, held at The Roundhouse in Camden (September 1). Marking her first full show since having hip surgery, the stage was set for Mother Monster - treating lucky competition winners to new tunes from her forthcoming ARTPOP album.
Feeling: After teasing her Little Monsters for weeks about her iTunes Festival show - dubbed SwineFest by the lady herself - excitement was running high as the crowd eagerly awaited the arrival of Gaga. Half-hour went by before Lady G emerged on stage to a roar of applause, floating above the crowd in a cage contraption before being freed to unleash the fresh sounds of her ARTPOP LP onto her audience.
The Look: In typical Gaga fashion, there were plenty of costume changes throughout her hour-long set. She kicked off proceedings in a black wig with a veil across her face before switching it up by donning a curly blonde wig, and silver glittery shell bra - reminiscent from her Applause music video.
After showering her fans with pink confetti, she then sported a tartan shirt and a pig mask, before stripping off to a tiny leather bikini. Ripping off her wig, she then exposed her real hair. This was met by another huge roar from the crowd, with Gaga completing her final look with a green ringmaster jacket, top hat and sparkly silver boots for her encore of Applause.
Tunes: There was no Poker Face or Bad Romance in sight as Lady G's set was jam packed with fresh cuts from her ARTPOP album. As promised, Gaga performed seven new songs, opening with the EDM-influenced track AURA, before exclaiming: "To say I've missed you is an understatement. When I'm away from you, I can't live." She then launched into MANiCURE, before giving her audience a taste of what was to come by singing LP title tune, ARTPOP.
Admitting her next tune was "a little different than the music I made before", Lady G unveiled hip-hop influenced tune Jewels and Drugs, poking fun at collaborator T.I., saying they "would't let him in the country" to grace the Roundhouse Festival stage with her. She was however joined by rappers Too $hort and Twista.
After a slight break, Gaga came back on stage to perform raunchy track Sex Dreams and Swine - where she welcomed a bunch of her 'little piggys', ripping of her wig to expose her real hair while exclaiming: "In order to write ARTPOP, I needed to take off all the wigs and make up... I used them to become different people. I just created someone else. In order to grow, I knew I had to show you what's underneath all of the theatre, so here I am."
Lady G then showed off her vocals on emotional, stripped-back piano ballad I Wanna Be With You, before wrapping things up with current single Applause.
Banter: Gaga was very vocal throughout her performance and seeing as it was such an intimate setting, there was plenty of interaction with the crowd. From her quirky English accent to throwing pig toys into the audience, Lady G's set oozed personality as she told the story of each of her new tunes.
Special Guests: Aside from Twista and Too $hort, this gig was very much about one person… Gaga. The 27-year old put on an epic show in a way that only she knows how, showcasing the very best from her forthcoming ARTPOP album, there was little time for special guests.
Celeb spots: The likes of actor Benedict Cumberbatch and Emma Watson were rumoured to be on the guestlist but we were far too busy obsessing over Gaga's next outfit to spot any A-listers! However, we did spy her proud dad Joe toe-tapping away to her new songs in the crowd.
Sweat Factor: Lady G's stint on stage was full of energetic dance routines, leaving the crowd stomping their feet and screaming for more which provided plenty of heat. The Roundhouse is an intimate, yet spacious venue so we didn't feel too sticky.
Summary: While we would have loved her to bust out some Gaga classics, it was clear from the start that tonight's show was all about ARTPOP. And from tonight's taster, we're pretty sure Mother Monster has another hit on her hands.
Set List:
AURA
MANiCURE
ARTPOP
Jewels & Drugs
Sex Dreams
Swine
I Wanna Be With You
Applause
MTV Rating: 4/5 stars
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The Independent - 3/5 stars
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The Gaga experience, rather like a dress made from meat, was never going to stay fresh forever. Last night at the Camden Roundhouse, before an audience of 5,000, the self-appointed Monster-in-Chief, headlining the first night of the iTunes Festival, laid down another bonkers pop manifesto: “When we're in this space together we make the most beautiful thing in the world - we make love”. And yet behind the fireworks, the fanfare and the Fame, we saw 2013 Gaga as a figure diminished.
Ms Germanotta, theatrics in tow, was of course at her provocative best. Arriving in a truly nightmarish Hannibal Lecter-esque mask, she was channelling her new brand of creepy minimalism. Wigs, typically, featured heavily (one choice costume-change saw her morph disturbingly into what appeared to be Shakira circa 'Whenever, Wherever').
And yet the six new tracks with which she delivered ARTPOP, her third album, to the world, did little to shake the persona so embedded in pop culture. The thumping techno overlaid with swelling vocals remains a formula to which she clings, and upon which her chart bankability relies. Her ability as a singer is formidable, but musically, she is less inventive than her wardrobe would suggest.
'#Swinefest', as the gig was bizarrely dubbed, perhaps wasn't one of her more dulcet promotional slogans, and yet a Twitter-primed crowd, composed of her Little and not-so-Little Monsters, was rammed into the Roundhouse, accessorised with pig noses and squealing for more.
With her every conceptual step (for those keeping score, we're now, with ARTPOP, on an exercise in reverse-Warholism in which art penetrates pop culture), the music, purportedly, shifts gear too. And there is no doubt that the thumping Euro-disco of The Fame Monster moved into the broader and more avant-garde avenues of synth- and electro-rock in the sprawling Born this Way, nor that she is returning (via a little 'complextro') to her pop roots with the new album. And yet, in spite of a mammoth collaborative effort, the result sounds just like everything else in the charts.
In popland today, outrageousness has lost all meaning. Trangression, experimentation, 'art' (for want of a better word) - these are ends in themselves. Gaga has sparked a movement which cheapens and commodifies the very boundary-pushing she stands for; she has diluted herself as both an artist and a brand.
Not to downplay the crazy, which was, in true Germanotta fashion, all kinds of off-the-wall. But with a platter of mediocre records - which fall, regrettably, in the month of Mileygate - she is, despite all the Applause, just another attraction at the zoo.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...n-8793722.html
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Telegraph - 4/5 stars
Lady Gaga breathily promised to reveal her true self onstage as she kicked off the iTunes festival but, inevitably, it turned out to be another act.
As the eccentric pop star sat at her keyboard, and began to wail about “a pig inside a human body” with the tremulous intensity of a highly-strung singer-songwriter at an amateur night, I was ready to believe we might be witnessing onstage a career-destroying nervous breakdown.
Then the band kicked in with a big prog-rock flourish before suddenly switching again so we were in the middle of a grinding dubstep anthem. Gaga grabbed her crotch and waved her fist in the air, as dancers in pig masks and white overalls bungee-jumped across the stage spraying paint. By the last flourish of a song written “to let go of all the pain” she was yelling, “Let’s hear it for my little piggies!”
As a performance it was completely bonkers but pop thrives on this kind of craziness and it is genuinely heartening to have the 27-year-old New Yorker back on the scene a year after she last played in London. Her third album, out in November, is self-consciously labelled Artpop. Stefani Germanotta has certainly mastered the art performance side and scored a series of great pop hits over the last four years but, on the evidence of seven new songs unveiled in the intimate space of the Roundhouse, she’s still some way off achieving the kind of integrated blend of music and ideas that you find in her hero, David Bowie.
She talks about striking out for musical freedom but, aside from the sheer ridiculousness of the aforementioned song Swine, her set sounds pretty much what you would expect to hear on any Radio One show – a mix of high-powered techno belters, erotic mid-tempo electropop numbers, chunky dubstep tracks featuring guest rappers and singalong power ballads with self-empowerment lyrics.
The presentation, however, is brilliant, fizzing with ideas and adding layers of wit to the proceedings in a show that starts with Gaga chained up in a burka and ends with her almost naked. An onstage costume change routine was presumably intended to emphasise the theme of stripping back the artifice but served mainly to keep things interesting in lulls between songs. She pulled off the trick of changing into a bathing costume in front of cameras with considerably more style than the Prime Minister. Stalking the stage in a Botticelli’s Venus-style conch shell swimsuit and giant tussled wig, singing a throbbing disco tune declaring “my artpop could mean anything”, this latest version of Lady Gaga may seem no more real than any previous version, and is all the more interesting for it.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/m...se-review.html
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Member Since: 10/3/2010
Posts: 50,276
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It was a great show. 
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Member Since: 8/11/2012
Posts: 13,230
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ATRL Contributor
Member Since: 11/5/2011
Posts: 100,491
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Looks like A$AP Rocky
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Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 6,009
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See a couple lies but not too many.
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Member Since: 1/20/2012
Posts: 25,077
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Originally posted by umichgrad07
Looks like A$AP Rocky
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 TOO FAR
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Member Since: 8/3/2012
Posts: 8,030
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I'm not holding a "critics" opinion above my own.
I enjoyed it and just pre-ordered ARTPOP.
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Member Since: 8/11/2012
Posts: 13,230
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Originally posted by heartbeats
Wigs, typically, featured heavily (one choice costume-change saw her morph disturbingly into what appeared to be Shakira circa 'Whenever, Wherever').
But with a platter of mediocre records - which fall, regrettably, in the month of Mileygate - she is, despite all the Applause, just another attraction at the zoo.
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Member Since: 8/3/2010
Posts: 71,871
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The Kats do the most always, let me just not comment further
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Member Since: 8/19/2013
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Originally posted by umichgrad07
Looks like A$AP Rocky
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but uglier.
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Member Since: 1/20/2012
Posts: 25,077
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Originally posted by RatedG²
The Kats do the most always, let me just not comment further
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I didn't write this review sorry to disappoint you mother!
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Member Since: 8/31/2013
Posts: 4,266
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And yet, in spite of a mammoth collaborative effort, the result sounds just like everything else in the charts.
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Okay 
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Member Since: 8/16/2010
Posts: 19,703
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she is, despite all the Applause, just another attraction at the zoo
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OMG why are they going IN like that on her? 
She was great.
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Member Since: 8/19/2013
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Tbh I didn't watch it, I only listened to it. And what I heard was great, it got me pumped.
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Member Since: 8/29/2012
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the fumes 
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Member Since: 4/10/2011
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Member Since: 11/15/2011
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I was thoroughly entertained and honestly these new tracks are great... from ARTPOP to Sex Dreams to Swine.
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Banned
Member Since: 7/2/2011
Posts: 15,547
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she is, despite all the Applause, just another attraction at the zoo.
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A mess.
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Member Since: 12/18/2010
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Quote:
Originally posted by umichgrad07
Looks like A$AP Rocky
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nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn;
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Banned
Member Since: 3/3/2012
Posts: 13,073
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His poor keyboards.
Besides fuming, he was perched at the stream.
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