ARTICLE BY JOY SHI
PHOTO BY DEREK SHAEFER
JAN. 24 | WEST HOLLYWOOD—Beyond a curtained-off tier at the House of Blues Los Angeles, Lorde, Rihanna, and Katy Perry gathered on Friday evening to mingle and mug for photos at Roc Nation's pre-GRAMMY party. But none of the former and currently GRAMMY-nominated pop stars performed; tonight they were only concertgoers. Perry and Rihanna posed for a silly photo with Grimes—the evening's headliner—sandwiched between them. Meanwhile, Lorde granted a lucky fan a photo and solemnly gushed on Instagram about Canada’s ambient pop duo Majical Cloudz. "one of the most simple and moving things i have seen, ever," she wrote.
And Lorde was right. Majical Cloudz's frontman Devon Welsh was the evening's most riveting act. An inimitable presence in a simple T-shirt, black jeans, and sneakers, he forcefully drove each vowel home, as producer Matthew Otto filled the room with swells of heavily sedated sound.
"Love is hard. Love is scary. You don’t want to go there," deadpanned Welsh after opening with "Childhood's End," off 2013's sweepingly gorgeous album Impersonator. Although he has a sense of humor, Welsh is also one of the most painfully direct modern songwriters. "Write hard and clear about what hurts," Ernest Hemingway once said. If ever there was a musician who swallowed that creed like it was fatal poison, it's Welsh. Lucky for the crowd, Majical Cloudz's brief but heavy set was balanced on either end by lighter-hearted episodes.
Grimes took the stage afterward for a nearly hour-long performance. Sporting a pixie-like dress, socks, and Adidas sandals, the Canadian DJ and performer frenetically paced and flounced about onstage, quickly turning the club into a Vegas-like affair, replete with bubbles and ballet dancers straight out of an American Apparel ad. They flocked to her on either side, as Grimes played ambient fragments and murmured incoherently and eerily into the microphone. She occasionally interrupted herself to play such crowd-pleasers as "Genesis" and "Oblivion," enthusiastically chiming in her thanks to various parties and flinging merchandise to her adoring fans.
Los Angeles band Wardell opened the star-studded evening. The brother-sister duo—Steven Spielberg's children who found music was an alternative to their filmmaker father's passion—doled out sweet handfuls of '60s beach pop off their EP The Brother/Sister.
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