Four years ago a British singer named Charli XCX began releasing hilarious, knowing and sometimes absurd electro-pop songs. She poked at the pieties of too-cool downtown girls on “Art Bitch” and of too-cool rich girls on “!Franchesckaar!” She tossed off ditties that sounded like adult parodies of children’s music, like “I Wanna Be Darth Vader.” She sounded world-weary but still lighthearted, a club kid zoned out on Adult Swim cartoons, a Lady Gaga preamble.
Erin Baiano for The New York Times
Charli XCX, whose debut American EP is coming soon, performed at the Knitting Factory on Saturday.
With age comes, if not wisdom, then at least polish and ambition. The Charli XCX of today — having released a couple of new British singles in recent months, and soon to release a debut American EP — is looking outward, not inward. Her best new songs, like “Stay Away” and “Nuclear Seasons,” are grand, skillful pop, slicker and less adventurous than her earlier oeuvre. They are the songs of a pro.
Saturday night at the Knitting Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, she was a little starburst, bright and untamed. Still only 19, she looked as if she’d been working rooms like this for decades, as if her performance were a dress rehearsal for some arena show the following night. Though she’s ordinarily given to outlandish outfits, here she kept it black and tight: midriff-baring top, leggings torn at the knees. Her hair was a spectacular tangle, moving in every direction at once. And while her singing was strong, it was her body that was loudest. Her moves were sporadic, intense and often more powerful than the music, as if she were recreating routines from a scratched fitness DVD.
She wasn’t even the headliner on this bill of up-and-comers organized by Neon Gold Records, but that’s probably a temporary inconvenience. Backed by just two musicians, one on synths and the other banging on drum and cymbal pads, she made an enormously tough noise, swaggering and sweaty. At times it recalled the elasticity of Robyn or the dark pomp of Zola Jesus but mostly it landed on styles that would have made for hits in 1984: the spookiness of Siouxsie Sioux, or flawless early-Madonna, a surprisingly uncommon shtick, and one she nails flawlessly.
Only the set closer, “Mess,” was different, with a nervous quality that recalled how the yelping, swinging vocals of the 1950s have been updated in modern British music.
But that was the only song, with its lack of emphasis on sensuality, on which Charli XCX felt unsteady. “How Can I” was full-bodied and dark, and “End of the World” was bubbly and cheeky. Most absorbing was “Stay Away,” a paranoiac plea for release from the grip of an unforgiving lover, or drug, or something. “I knew you were no angel,” she sang with youthful confidence, then added, with naïve anxiety, “but God, what did I do-ooh-ooh?” Growing up can mean misbehaving, sure, but also understanding the consequences.