Live Review: Billie Eilish, FINNEAS

FINNEAS – Billie Eilish’s collaborator and older brother – capably trots out his serviceable but spark-less solo songs. He’s clearly talented and knows all the frontman moves, but he’d probably be languishing in YouTube obscurity if not for his work with his superstar sister.

Billie Eilish’s set begins with a Tim Burton-esque animation replete with all the nightmarish imagery (Eyeballs! Spiders! Weird hands!) that’s become her stock-in-trade. Eilish bounds on stage to Bad Guy in a baggy, black outfit. Her celestial whisper-singing is almost entirely drowned out by the screams of the pogoing, pubescent crowd. It’s like an extremely lively and well-attended school dance. Accompanied by multi-instrumentalist FINNEAS and a live drummer, Eilish wends her way through the dark, oblique pop of My Strange Addiction, Xanny and basically every other song she’s released. Between songs there is no clapping, only shrieking.

It’s even more apparent in the live setting that the bones of these songs are undergirded by solid, classic pop songwriting. “If you hate yourself, this song is for you,” she says of Idontwannabeyouanymore. In the past, it might have been called (Don’t Wanna Be) Without You Anymore and introduced with, “If you love someone, this song is for you.” But sonically and melodically, this vulnerable waltz could’ve been sung by any number of popstars. What distinguishes Eilish lies mostly in the packaging. Beneath the macabre lyrics and imagery, the contrast between this and their parents’ Tori Amos and Sinead O’Connor CDs isn’t as great as a teenager would like to believe. This is largely a good thing. 

Eilish is a prodigiously natural performer, shrugging and striding around the stage. She occasionally waves the microphone in our direction, as if the inexhaustible crowd needs any encouragement. When the screams die down for particularly delicate ballads like Listen Before I Go or Ocean Eyes, her ethereal voice is undeniably impressive. FINNEAS joins Billie for the seated, acoustic duet I Love You, followed by a moment of warm sibling affection.

In the final stretch, Eilish implores the audience to hold their phones next to, rather than in front of, their faces. She explains that this moment, right now, will never happen again, and we just need to feel it, which elicits a lot of emphatic nodding from parents chaperoning their Snapchat-obsessed preteens. Based on the reaction tonight, Eilish’s album might be this generation’s Jagged Little Pill or Let Go. Whether it proves to be the beginning of a pop dynasty or a time capsule of a very specific moment, the crowd assembled here is likely to feel intense nostalgia for this moment and these songs years from now, and not without reason.