I first saw Rina Sawayama live at London’s Brixton Academy on Halloween 2019, supporting her Beg For You collaborator Charli XCX. Now a headliner in her own right, it’s a full circle moment being reunited in the same space as her once again during spooky season three years later – albeit a good few westerly miles away from Brixton at Cardiff University’s Great Hall. A much smaller venue but with some clever staging, dramatic lighting, backup dancers and a Eurovision-style wind machine, Sawayama delivers a powerhouse performance.
First support act Tom Rasmussen’s day job is in freelance fashion editorial, and it shows: at one point, Rasmussen disappears from the stage to change from a Rina t-shirt and kilt into a sparkly, knitted crop top and cheerleader skirt. But they aren’t just a ‘look queen’; building up a rapport with the largely Gen Z audience comes easily, including a shout-out to a plastic skeleton bopping along above heads. Rasmussen’s falsetto voice is a pleasant contrast to their square shoulders and bushy beard, while their music – sensitive and disco-inflected – radiates epithets of queer joy and acceptance, the fist-pumping “Fucking look at me” chorus of their closing number going down particularly well.
The energy comes down a few notches for Joesef, whose soulful indie stylings are mellower, but the Glaswegian up-and-comer – due for a debut album release and solo tour come next March – still wins over new fans with a hearty call-and-response and welcome cover of Sister Sledge classic Thinking Of You (“only the gays know this one”).
Waiting for Rina Sawayama to arrive on stage, my plus one – less familiar with her music than I am – asks what genre I’d classify her as. I struggle to land on a single categorisation. While alt-pop is the algorithm-friendly response, Sawayama’s catalogue spans everything from 00s r’n’b to nu-metal to country ballads. It sounds like an artist having an identity crisis, but somehow, this melting pot of Y2K nostalgia and contemporary pop synergises together to produce a live show of fantastic range, emotionality and, above all, fun.
New album Hold The Girl, she tells us, is very much a therapeutic record: the result of a quarter-life crisis and dredging up past demons to do with family and identity. Before launching into the album’s power ballad title track, Sawayama promises to take us on a journey through genre and sensation with her, starting with some upbeat pop-rock (Catch Me In The Air, Hurricanes) before transitioning into industrial rock-rap (Your Age, which turns the Great Hall into a sweaty Matrix 2 cave rave) and then lighting the fuse for enthused head nodding with experimental metal-pop fusion, STFU.
When the aggression subsides, Sawayama is ‘reborn’ in fluttering white for a seated, acoustic performance of Send My Love To John. EDM-leaning belters To Be Alive and Phantom follow, the singer’s powerful vocals carried higher by a huge halo of white light and hair billowing in the artificial wind.
The evening closes out with Sawayama’s more well-known, clubbier hits, Comme des Garçons, XS and – glittery cowboy hat donned – This Hell, which is broken up by her dividing and pitting the two sides of the room against one another in a sing-off. The song is part peppy middle finger to religious-fulled queerphobia, part Shania Twain tribute.
Fittingly, Man, I Feel Like A Woman playing us out of the venue is met with another impromptu karaoke moment as the high spirits continue even with the gig wrapped up. I went in liking Rina Sawayama and left loving her, certain that this impressive display is demonstrative of an artist on the ascendency to superstardom.
Rina Sawayama / Tom Rasmussen / Joesef, Great Hall, Cardiff University Students Union, Mon 24 Oct
words HANNAH COLLINS photos HANNAH NICOLSON-TOTTLE
