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When you’re a pop star who knows more than a little about mystique, hero worship, delayed gratification, theatricality and style, this is how you take the stage: Enter wearing a balaclava topped with a Pittsburgh Pirates cap, half dude, half Spider-Man. Make your many-thousand admirers sing along for a few minutes before removing that headgear altogether, allowing your mullet to flop down toward your shoulders like the boughs of a Christmas tree when it comes down off the car roof. Flash a grin more crooked than the Coca-Cola wave, then slowly reorganize your facial musculature into a cold stare of triumph — a gaze worn by emperors, prophets, pro wrestlers or anyone else who knows the sensation of momentarily owning the world.
One question, here: How does Peso Pluma already know all of this stuff? When the 24-year-old native of Guadalajara, Mexico, brought his first U.S. tour through Jiffy Lube Live in Bristow, Va., on Friday night, everything felt beyond his years. Maybe it’s the sound. His voice is the buzzy croak of a vocalist three times his age, and he uses it to sing 21st-century versions of traditional Mexican corridos, high-drama story songs sung in Spanish that date back to the Mexican revolution. As his star continues to rise on streaming services, Peso Pluma’s music has become the sound of something very old doing something very new.
On Friday night, the newest of the new came from “Genesis,” a fabulous new album in which the finest songs feel staunchly traditional, dazzlingly youthful, noble, principled and against the odds. Onstage, his seven-piece backing band played acoustic instruments almost exclusively — including an upright bass called a tololoche that boomed and cracked; a pair of alto horns, the charchetas, that stuttered and throbbed; and a requinto guitar that chirped like a dangerously caffeinated bird of paradise.
Alongside all that labyrinthine zest, Peso Pluma squeezed lyrics about love and menace through his singular combination of throat and sinuses, sounding as disgusted, delighted or distressed as any moment required. During the me-against-them boasts of “Rubicon,” he phrased his way through the band’s highly intricate instrumentation as if on tiptoe. Over the exquisitely slurred tempos of “Bye,” a ballad about an evaporated romance, he delivered the titular one-word refrain like air leaking from a tire.
It felt so easy to commit both brain and body to this delectable tightening and loosening — but it felt even easier to get the sense that nobody in the entire place was listening closer to Peso Pluma than Peso Pluma. He would occasionally station himself directly between his charcheta players, shaking his head back and forth in their sputtery crosstalk, unable to get a word in. Other times, he would lean over next to the tololoche, soak up the low-end, then skip himself across the stage like a stone, pumping a gloved fist in the direction of God, as if dancing to a trap song that wasn’t there.
Unless it was. Peso Pluma clearly knows how to hear the latent right-now in the music of yesterday. He was up there showing us how to hear it, too. As for all those emperor glares in the direction of his ecstatic young audience, maybe that’s just Peso Pluma’s listening face — a new star staring off into space as his ears acclimate to the sound of his future.
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Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/08/27/peso-pluma-concert-review-dc-virginia/