There was a clear “out on a school night” vibe at Mercy Lounge on Monday for the Kitten/Charli XCX gig: lots of X’s on hands, a handful of obvious chaperones, a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels sneaked in and quickly consumed in the bathroom. Raw youth was on full display. We were worried upon arrival that the club was going to be dead empty, because there was plenty of parking outside, but we guess everyone carpooled or cabbed it over.
Opener Kitten went over extremely well with the slow-growing crowd. The L.A.-based group vacillated between a dark late-'80s synth-pop vibe and a Deftones-ish melodic heaviness. Lead singer Chloe Chaidez, a petite young woman with the thickest head of hair we’ve ever seen, thrashed around the stage almost carelessly, even bumping her head on the speakers at one point. Head-banging is in, and the kids loved it.
At certain points, Chaidez's hair flipped completely over her face, and it looked for all the world like Cousin Itt was the frontman. But that wasn’t the weirdest thing: The weirdest thing was a “Purple Rain” cover that we struggled to identify as such until Chaidez literally started singing “purple rain.” There was also a fake-out of Alphaville’s “Forever Young” (we really wanted to hear it!), but it segued into a very hard-rocking Yeah Yeah Yeahs-esque jam. The crowd fucking loved Kitten, lining up to meet them at the merch table. We didn’t realize how long it had been since we’ve actually seen a band interact with fans immediately after their set; good hustle, kids.
Headliner Charli XCX’s band was all girls, and we mean that literally: Not a one of them looked over 21 years old. They were dressed in schoolgirl uniforms but danced like they were more in tune with Robert Palmer than Britney Spears. It’s always a deliberate decision for a singer to have an all-female band, especially one that’s in the peer group of the performer herself. Though maybe not 100 percent on board with their novelty styling, we are always on board with seeing more women onstage.
It was right around 10:30 when Charli's set started, and she shot through some songs from her recently released debut album: the ballad-ish “Stay Away,” the cheeky “You (Ha Ha Ha)” and super-duper crowd favorite “Black Roses,” a song on which she effectively implemented heavy metal thrashing, which was the theme for the night. Every time Charli stepped back from her blue LED mic stand (that looked like a long fluorescent tube) to dance and slam around, the girls in the audience went wild.
The one-two punch of “I Love It” (the hit song she wrote and guested on for Icona Pop) and new single and actual best song “SuperLove” seriously amped up the crowd, a crowd that had much more men in it than we expected. One of them handed her a scepter. “This song is about getting high,” Charli said of “Take My Hand,” and we realized that all of her songs sound better at night than in the daytime (last time we saw her was at Bonnaroo in the brutal light of day).
Kitten's Chaidez joined Charli onstage for a relatively faithful cover of Bow Wow Wow’s version of “I Want Candy,” and soon after the show was over, houselights on by 11:30. It had only been about an hour, but she pretty much ran through her whole catalog during that time. It was probably a good thing that it was such an early night, though; most of the crowd had school tomorrow.
