Jade Review: Pop's Quirkiest Star Rises Above TV-Created Past
Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of ex-participants of TV talent show-manufactured bands seldom grip the public imagination. These efforts typically adhere to certain rules – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least one single featuring a guest appearance by an US hip-hop artist, or a move into mature Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they typically become a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable reunion tour.
An Idiosyncratic Path
This common scenario that renders the unconventional route currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She’s certainly not above engaging in the typical activities that ex-reality TV group artists are known for undertaking, including loudly underlining that she's free from the press-managed restrictions of the factory-produced music business – judging by the audience this evening, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a handheld cooling device emblazoned with the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from the track Gossip, her musical partnership with dance duo the group Confidence Man – but regardless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop music with a far more fascinating style than usual.
An Impressive First Single
She launched her individual career with last year’s superb her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jarring and disjointed melange of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and samples from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.
As the set on her first solo tour proves, not everything on her debut album her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as her debut single: Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it’s also typical dancefloor-oriented pop, powered by precisely the Supremes sample the name implies; the show is extended with a cover of Madonna’s Frozen that transforms into a musical compilation of 90s dance hits, from the track Pacific State by 808 State to Set You Free by N-Trance.
Additional Fascinating Content
However, there exists additional material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. The song Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with verses that offer a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She offers Unconditional to her mum: it has a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar combined with clanging industrial drums. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the musical aesthetic of 2000s electronic punk movement, or more accurately the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by the electroclash genre, while the track Natural at Disaster begins like a piano ballad before suddenly shifting into a malevolent electronic grind.
An Appealing Presence
The artist on stage is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished figure: she declares, she states at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; giving a shoutout to her queer audience members, who are here in force, she proposes thanking them by adding a official undergarment to the merch stand.
What Lies Ahead
It could conclude the way such individual artistic pursuits end – the enmity towards former bandmate Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to announce that the original group are reunited – but the fact that every attendee seem to be word-perfect as they join in vocally to an album that only came out a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And even if it does, the final performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Jade's individual musical path is unlikely to recede into the realms of the barely recalled interim project.
Jade performs at the Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester this evening and is touring the UK through October 23rd.
