Jade Review: The Music World's Most Unique Artist Transcends Manufactured Past
With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of former members of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the public imagination. These efforts typically adhere to certain rules – often a pursuit at a toughened-up R&B sound, replete with at least a track featuring a guest appearance by an American rapper, or a lunge towards mature Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they typically become a barely recalled interim project, the sight and sound of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable band comeback concerts.
A Unique Journey
It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that ex-reality TV group artists are known for undertaking, among them loudly underlining that she's free from the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – judging by the audience this evening, the top-selling product on the official goods stand is a handheld cooling device emblazoned with the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from Gossip, her musical partnership with electronic pair the group Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop music with a far more fascinating style than usual.
A Superb Debut
She opened her solo account with the previous year's excellent her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jarring and disjointed mixture of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.
During the performance on her initial individual concert series proves, not every song on her first full-length release her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as that: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it’s also standard-issue disco pop, powered by precisely the Supremes sample the name implies; things are padded out with a cover of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves 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
But there’s also more where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with verses that present a nearly discordant brand of funk or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She offers the track Unconditional to her mum: it features a wonderful tune, early 80s syndrums, and crashing rock guitar combined with metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the musical aesthetic of 2000s electronic punk movement, or more accurately the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by electroclash, while the track Natural at Disaster starts out like a keyboard-led emotional song before suddenly shifting into a malevolent electronic grind.
A Charming Performer
The artist on stage is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished presence: she is, she announces at a certain moment, “shaking like a shitting dog”; giving a shoutout to her queer audience members, who are here in force, she suggests showing appreciation by adding a official undergarment to the merchandise booth.
Future Possibilities
It could conclude the way these kind of solo careers typically finish – the enmity towards ex-group member Jesy Nelson expressed in the song Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to declare that the original group are back – but the reality that the entire audience appear knowing every lyric as they sing along to a record that was released just a month ago causes one to ponder. And even if it does, the final performance of Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Jade's individual musical path is unlikely to recede into the domain of the barely recalled interim project.
Jade performs at the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester tonight and is traveling across the United Kingdom until 23 October.
