I don’t totally understand the Sky Ferreira phenomenon. She has a nice voice, she is cute and her songs are poppy-catchy, but really what’s the novelty in all this? Once again there was a very long line in front of Amoeba on Wednesday night, and seeing the scene around 4:30 pm, a large crowd had probably started to form more than two hours ahead of the show,… and all this for just four songs? Sky Ferreira played the shortest performance I have ever seen at Amoeba! Sure she had a 200-people signing afterwards, but not everyone had been able to buy her 2013 album ‘Night Time, My Time’ (with her naked breast on the cover!) to secure a place in the signing,… so, for some people, it has been a lot of waiting for a very short performance.
Honestly, I knew almost nothing about her before I went to the show, I hadn’t even bothered listening to her songs, and all I knew was her recent problem with the law (her famous mug shot) and her heroine chic look. Oh yes, I also knew about her boyfriend, Zachary Cole Smith, the Kurt Cobain wannabe, as I saw him play with his own band DIIV at a street fair, a year and half ago. He hadn’t attracted as many people, but I enjoyed the show. And yes, I also know the two of them covered Elliott Smith recently, and this is of course an excellent point in my book,… but I digress.
Now that she is a brunette, Sky Ferreira looks like is a cross between Rihanna (she has that forehead) and Katy Perry, but she was wearing nothing close to these two’s outrageously sexy or ridiculous clothes,… with her red plaid dress, her vintage leather jacket, she looked more rock-grunge. Wearing her sunglasses indoor and her cap backwards, she sounded good and was at ease on stage, even interacting with the crowd playfully. But the show went so fast, she sang ‘24 Hours’, ‘Ain’t Your Right’, ‘Everything Is Embarrassing’ and ‘You’re Not The One’, while I was trying to get some good pics, but suddenly she said ‘I hope to see some of you at the Staples Center’ and waved bye bye. What? That’s it? I barely had time to listen to you Sky! By the way, she opens for Miley Cyrus at the Staples,…hum doesn’t it say it all ? Is she a sort of hipsters’ queen going mainstream?
From hearing the crescendo of screams coming from the audience every time she was announcing a song, I got the impression she sang her best songs, and they all sounded poppy, in a vague indie way. If I get all these references to the 80s pop, these slight impressions of post-punk-noise-pop, it wasn’t too obvious live, the songs were pleasant and catchy enough, a bit faux-experiment, but at the end, they were quite common places and she did not really differentiate herself from the forever multiplying pool of mainstream of pop stars … all I could hear were these crowd-moving pop anthems coming alive thanks to her strong voice, as she had a really nice voice live. For the short amount I was able to see her, I could tell Sky Ferreira has some charisma but she was on the tiny Amoeba stage, not on the mega structure of the Staples Center. When I left the place I wondered whether all this, this large crowd at Amoeba, would even exist if she weren’t this Calvin Klein model, Miley Cyrus’ buddy and indie-film actress who has been so hyped by the media. Bad or good girl – she seemed to be very gracious with her fans during the signing – at one point she will have to choose between being the next Britney Spears or the next Bethany Cosentino.
More photo’s here:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.482680185175506.1073741864.163447513765443&type=3