Romy Brings Exuberance to “Club Mid Air” in New York City: Review
The post Romy Brings Exuberance to “Club Mid Air” in New York City: Review appeared first on Consequence.
“Are you emotional? Do you want to dance?” Romy asked the eager crowd at Knockdown Center, the newly-renovated Queens venue on Friday, March 29th. The answer, of course, was yes — at “Club Mid Air,” the live show celebrating Romy’s 2023 solo album Mid Air, audiences didn’t come solely to dance and jump (and bump and grind, as it turned out). There was to be an emotional release, a sense of openness binding the room together.
As a member of The xx, Romy became well-versed in the practice of offering vulnerability and tenderness, both on records and in live shows, where the trio could explore a more active sound that lifted off from their minimalist origins. She and Oliver Sim always seemed to wear their hearts on their sleeves, crushingly represented by songs like “Angels,” “Chained,” or the Jamie xx cut, “Loud Places.”
Now in her solo era, Romy has taken that vulnerability and made it ecstatic. With Mid Air, she’s drawn from the well of the music that reached her when she was an adolescent: diva disco, euro-pop, and queer dance jams. It’s been an intriguing pivot from a musician who began her career with stark, carefully-drawn portraits of intimacy, never explicitly acknowledging her queer identity within the songs. Based on the immediacy of Mid Air standouts “She’s on My Mind” and “Enjoy Your Life,” Romy has traded subtlety for urgent blasts of color. Now, she has much more in common with the fluorescent hues of Jamie xx’s solo work than the indie world she was flung into in the early 2010s.
So, the limited run of US shows this year under the name “Club Mid Air” promised that kind of beaming exuberance. With the album’s neon-lit album cover, you could practically imagine the kaleidoscopic club-scape adorned with those same sleek, vibrant lasers. While the overall look of the show was in line with this vision, it did feel altered by the sheer volume of people.
Knockdown Center is a very narrow building with very high ceilings. The sound, for an electronic show, was terrific, but seeing Romy proved challenging. The way the room funnels out near the stage gives an illusion of more space (see: another New York venue, Terminal 5), which encourages people to crowd the front, exacerbating the problem. Perhaps a second night would have helped the audience feel a little less loaded, or perhaps Knockdown Center just isn’t much fun when the audience is that close to capacity.
Still, when Romy took the stage — with a DJ in tow, a variation on her usual set singing and DJing solo — the energy of the room became euphoric, and the echoing acoustics of Knockdown Center’s high ceilings aided a deafening roar from the crowd. She ran through most of the songs off Mid Air, focusing predominately on her vocal performance and leading the crowd with ecstatic jumps and a genuine smile. Romy appeared focused and extremely gracious — especially when the night’s special guest, the electro-punk artist Peaches, came onstage to perform a rousing rendition of Romy’s “Did I.”
Everyone in Romy’s immediate radius seemed to know every word to every Mid Air song, which was unsurprising — until she played and sang a remixed version of The xx’s “Angels,” and hardly anyone was familiar. It was a testament to Romy having truly found her audience. In 2024, post-Gaga and in the midst of the MUNAs, the Chappell Roans, and the Troye Sivans, queer pop is having its most unabashed moment. While Romy’s music isn’t as campy as some of these contemporaries, it is as devotional, horny, consuming, and freeing — and it seems the crowd was well aware of that on Friday night.
Those consuming themes — love as a bursting, unceasing state of being, desire as primal urgency — made their way into each and every song of Romy’s set. They were exemplified in a brand new song that Romy busted out for both the New York and Los Angeles “Club Mid Air” shows, which heavily interpolates Donna Lewis’ one-hit-wonder “I Love You Always Forever.” The song, slightly quicker than the sample’s original, radiated with warmth, fizzing and bursting into an earned, cacophonous chorus.
While fan-favorites “She’s on My Mind” and “Strong” were certainly cathartic, the greatest moment of the set arrived with Romy’s open-hearted, genuinely moving “Enjoy Your Life.” The performance epitomized the entire set — the command to her audience to live loudly, the capital F-feelings that come with that sentiment, the air of acceptance and joy that the room carried, and the love and safety that her queer community serves right back to her. When the final chorus dropped, it seemed like everybody in the jammed, impossibly crowded room finally had space, and used that space to jump and dance with teeming emotion.
“Enjoy Your Life” was such a great climax to her pre-encore slate that it felt slightly misplaced within the set (“Strong,” a great song concocted with Fred again.., would have served its place better instead of the final closer). In fact, at just over an hour, the whole show actually felt too short. ”
Romy has been around the block quite a few times, but with her solo career, she’s just getting started. For now, it’s enough to relish in the open-hearted glory of these songs, elbow room be damned.
Romy Brings Exuberance to “Club Mid Air” in New York City: Review
Paolo Ragusa
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