Raye3Arena, Dublin★★★★★
There are times during Raye’s This Tour May Contain New Music show when you wonder how she is pulling this off.
It’s not just the genre-hopping from jazzy R&B to full-blown torch songs to dance-pop. It’s not just the fact she sells out arenas with what is, for much of the running time, a big-band set so mid-century she can slide in a cover of Fly Me to the Moon without it jarring. It’s not just that she speaks with such raw purpose and rallying spirit about her experience of sexual assault – while introducing survivorship ballad Ice Cream Man – and you know she does this every night.
It’s also her capacity to “go deep”, as she puts it, then bounce into euphoric recovery mode, with the “Y” of the bulb lights that spell out her name disappearing to make way for a “V”. It’s also the manner with which she shrinks the 3Arena to the status of an intimate club – one in which it is entirely natural to indulge in short skits and showbiz patter, expand upon her conviction that “music is medicine” and finish with the catharsis of a we-have-one-life philosophy. “I declare there will be joy,” Raye chants as her sisters and support acts, Absolutely and Amma, join her on stage for new song Joy.
Ice Cream Man remains the emotional centrepiece, though the other expected highlights all deliver. Oscar Winning Tears, also from her first album, My 21st Century Blues, demonstrates her prowess for segueing from speak-singing to full belt. New single Nightingale Lane, about the oddness of her ex-boyfriend becoming a stranger, lends itself to a relatable pre-song explanation. The amusingly brio-filled Where is My Husband! – which recently became her second UK number one – is dispatched early with customary panache, while the career-best melodic pathos of her first number one, Escapism, is saved for the encore.
What is more surprising is the success with which she slots the forewarned “new music” into the slipstream of her best-known songs without any noticeable dip in audience goodwill. Her second album, This Music May Contain Hope, is not released until March 27th and it is unusual, as she acknowledges, to tour first, but since being released from her contract with Polydor and becoming an independent artist – a status now firmly part of her identity – she is not bound by any template.
Happily, the new songs shape up well, from the near sad-banger vibe of Lifeboat to the moodiness of Click Clack Symphony, which showcases her penchant for squeezing in lots of words. You want her to indulge in as many playful musical detours as possible to keep things interesting.
The tour poster also promised “dramatic endings, a brass section, love and passion, at least one jazz cover, potential waffling (excessive unnecessary chatting), a big belted note, a nightclub segment, live strings and a musical hug should you need one”. That about sums it up, though vintage glamour and comedy asides are also part of the package.
Raye, aka Rachel Keen, is in her “dramatic era”, she says. But she can only do what she does because her voice has power, range and – above all else – control. What is truly impressive is the skill with which she has imbued this show with those same attributes. There is no messiness in this drama, just star quality and a rare vivacity.