Review: Billie Eilish thrills ecstatic crowd at PPG Paints Arena
By Scott Mervis / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
In what looked like a movie scene, Billie Eilish elevated above the PPG Paints Arena stage Sunday night passionately addressing the subject of “THE GREATEST,” singing “All my love and patience/Unappreciated.”
Perhaps that situation didn’t flourish but there’s no lack of appreciation whatsoever from the Eilish faithful, who adore the 22-year-old superstar with an intensity that goes well beyond the usual relationship between artist and fan.
Eilish captured them five years ago with a debut album of dark, pulsing electropop, and while it was so sudden, so unique and so under-the-radar that it could have been a one-off, through three albums, she has yet to disappoint them.
This third arena tour supports the universally acclaimed album “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” which came out of the basement of brother/producer Finneas and doesn’t stray from her style of whispering-to-booming bedroom pop.
That she can translate to an arena stage in front of 18,000 people remains one of the more remarkable feats of modern pop.
On Sunday, the ninth stop on an 81-date tour, she played her first show here with a full live band and two backup singers and without her big brother, who is involved with his own solo project.
The sold-out crowd of young females was so excited they were doing the wave in the moments before her dramatic arrival on top of a video-screen cube, looking adorable in a backwards cap and oversized, skeleton-design hockey jersey.
When she went into one of her wild spins to the pounding opener “CHIHIRO,” the fans went crazy. They also did when she just stood there after a few songs, glaring, smiling and soaking in the hysteria.
“Woo, I love the energy in here,” she said. “ Are you going to keep it up?”
Of course they were, Sunday scaries be damned. The fans were determined to take the lead vocals whenever possible, especially on the quiet ones like “WILDFLOWER.”
“I love loud screaming,” she said. “It’s my favorite thing you do.”
When she asked for silence to construct a loop of her own humming vocals for the beautiful “When the Party’s Over,” there was not a single sound but her.
Eilish mastered that quiet-loud dynamic, working in the rectangle on a floor-length stage with the four musicians split between two pits.
In just under 100 minutes, she ran through 25 songs (some partial), hitting favorites from all three albums and varying from fragile ballads to booming club music in the “bad guy” mode with bass you could feel in your chest.
The new album came to vivid life, in the warped cabaret of “THE DINER” and in the dreamy crescendo of “THE GREATEST,” one of the show’s highlights.
The moment was so big, she settled it all down, sitting with an acoustic guitar and her backup singer friends for “Male Fantasy,” a gentle moment that showed off the soft beauty of her voice.
That lingered through “SKINNY” and “TV,” with the crowd soaring as a choir, ultimately repeating the chant of “Maybe I’m, maybe I’m, maybe I’m the problem.”
Who can’t relate to that, right?
Eilish was back in dark banger mode, with blasts of pyro on “bury a friend,” and red lasers and relentless primal beats on “Oxytocin.”
The pacing was near perfect and the stage was a show in itself, at times so intense that this didn’t need to go on too long.
She spent most of “everything i wanted” and “BLUE” down in the crowd, slapping hands with hundreds of fans, then was back up, at the piano, to serenade them with a medley of “lovely,” “idontwannabeyouanymore” and the song that brought her “ocean eyes,” hitting her highest soprano notes.
“L'AMOUR DE MA VIE” hit so hard, it felt like the showstopper, but there was more.
“I don’t want you to ever feel like I’m not there, cause I’m always there,” she said, before easing into a sing-along of her “Barbie” Oscar-winner “What Was I Made For?” and then breaking the sound barrier with “Happier Than Ever.”
“I think I’m partially deaf,” I heard someone say walking out. That was part of the price of admission.
The first time we saw her at PPG, she seemed a little on the shy and awkward side. Two years later, Eilish was in full command.
Billie Eilish set list
CHIHIRO
LUNCH
NDA
Therefore I Am
WILDFLOWER
when the party's over
THE DINER
ilomilo
bad guy
THE GREATEST
Male Fantasy
SKINNY
TV
BITTERSUITE
bury a friend
Oxytocin
you should see me in a crown
Guess (Charli xcx cover) (Remix)
everything i wanted
BLUE
lovely/idontwannabeyouanymore/ocean eyes
L'AMOUR DE MA VIE
What Was I Made For?
Happier Than Ever
BIRDS OF A FEATHER
BLUE