Kitten at the Echo on Tuesday June 28th, 2011
Kitten, or rather Chloe Chaidez, was really the star of the moment on Tuesday night at the Echo, and it was difficult to realize that this girl is only 16. On stage, she impressively embodied some punk energy even though the music that the band was playing was a little all over the place.
Wearing black ties and a black leather mini short, she was moving faster than light, shaking and undulating her body like a crazy possessed girl, rolling her back on the floor, kneeling down, jumping on the drums, as she was basically adopting all the right moves to make us believe we are watching the greatest punk show on earth.
Kitten played two kinds of tunes, some punkier, rawer ones, like ‘Transmission’ or ‘Japanese Eyes’, during which Chloe was moving her body like a maniac, playing her sexy bad girl with malice, and some pop-rock ones (‘Apples’, ‘Kill the Light’, ‘Catholic boys’) really poppy if you were listening carefully, but somewhat packaged like some alternative punk songs and fooling everybody thanks to the bold attitude of the front girl.
When she sang ‘Kill the Light’ for example, I thought I was listening to this kind of bubble gum pop you can hear everywhere and I did not care that much; on the Echo club page, they wrote: ‘This is the dark, indie response to Taylor Swift’s moans for Romeo’, I was not really thinking to that blonde chanteuse when I was watching Chloe, but I totally got when they meant! However with their next song, the quintet was back to rawer material and it was definitively not Taylor-Bieber land anymore.
Alternating between the guitar and the tambourine on hand, Chloe kicked her bassist in the front a few times, invited a toy boy from the audience on stage during the last song, danced with him for a few seconds before getting rid of him like a used sock, playing her bad girl to the perfection. Well, she had some confidence and presence on stage, to say the least.
With her powerful vocals, very mature for her tender age, she could be a star-in-the-making, as you could already hear people from the audience screaming her name, and during some tunes witha sort of punk-disco ambiance, Chloe was shining, close to a brunette Blondie.
The whole band is really young, late teens-early twenties, and when you have already been compared to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Cat Power, Blondie, Siouxsie Sioux, Meiko and The Killers, what else can they accomplish?
Setlist:
Transmission
Japanese Eyes
Apples
Kill the Light
Hot Rod
Johnny
Chinatown
Catholic boys
Kitten
