Tate McRae was born in the pop summer of 2003, the summer that climaxed in the legendary kiss between Britney and Madonna at the MTV Video Music Awards. Tate could have been the baby born from that kiss, because she does their legacy proud. The Canadian star brought her Miss Possessive tour to New York’s Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night, for a manic pop-glitz spectacle. Everything about her show is louder-louder, faster-faster, more-more-more, especially Tate herself.
We’re living in a golden age for main pop girls, but Tate stands out by going for the classic Britney/Xtina vibe of the early 2000s, with power-disco energy and sex in the air. Not the dewy-eyed woe-is-me sensitive type, this one. She’s trouble. She did not come here to read you her damn poetry. She radiates total “lock up your sons” energy onstage, even in her ballads, but any time she slows down to catch a feeling, you can count the seconds until she crushes it under her stiletto.
So the Tate show is definitely not a place you go to feel your feelings and sing along and cry and hug it out and drunk-text your exes. It’s where you go when your goal is feeling yourself a fraction as hard as Tate does — and that’s a mighty high bar.
Last night she did most of her new album So Close To What, with a handful of earlier hits. But she kept grinding and writhing through it all, for a delightfully rowdy NYC crowd rocking enough leopardskin to populate a rainforest. “It’s so crazy for me to be playing Madison Square Garden again!,” she told the audience. “It’s one of those arenas that feels like a fever dream every time you play it. It’s just fucking crazy.”
Swedish opener Zara Larsson hyped up the room with an ace set of hits like “Crush,” from her upcoming Midnight Sun, honoring her roots with Britney’s “Gimme More.” Opening-act innovation, Part 1: she had the video screens displaying her name at all times, in case she worried about anyone not knowing who she was. (It also displayed a QR code, which looked way too downmarket for this stage.) Opening-act innovation, Part 2: in her last song, “Symphony,” she slammed it home with, “We have one more chorus left! One more chorus! Sixty seconds to go!” More people should do that.
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Tate took the stage to “Miss Possessive,” after an overlong delay. (Basic pop-star rule: you do not want your crowd doing the wave to amuse themselves before your set.) But what an entrance. First, there was a clip of Tate backstage, watching video monitors of crowd footage, in her underwear. Then her posse of beefcake dancing studs strutted out, in their billowing button-free shirts, striking a classic sensitive boy-band pose — it was like a Dru Hill reunion gig in here. Their tops and Tate’s hair fluttered in the breeze of a wind machine absurdly cranked up to Stage 4 hurricane levels. But if you bet the over/under on how long the boys’ shirts would stay on, you probably lost, because they somehow survived all the way to the third song.
Tate made her name as a dancer, competing on So You Think You Can Dance, and she’s got that energy down to her bones. She kept busting her eroto-acrobatic moves all night. Her band consisted of a drummer and a guitarist, which looked weird considering the synth-disco sounds, but they bravely held their ground. For her excellent “Purple Lace Bra,” she sat alone in a chair, while everyone else onstage was half of a lap dance.
“I can show you better than I can tell you,” her voice-over narration purred on the speakers, as Tate crawled her methodical way down the catwalk toward her rendezvous with destiny, which turned out to be a stripper pole. She worked it out for “Uh Oh,” “Dear God,” and her most underrated tune, “Siren Sounds.” At the end, her guitarist ventured down the catwalk to play an awesomely Eighties cheese-metal solo that was like Nuno Bettencourt’s eyelashes making sweet love to Neal Schon’s back hair.
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She did an interlude focusing on the Softer Side of Tate, changing into a sheer gown for ballads like “Greenlight” and “Nostalgia.” “I just turned 22 this year,” she explained. “I feel like I was just thinking so much about time. Nostalgia is such an interesting concept to me, so I wrote a song about it.” She also did a medley of early tunes from her teenage YouTuber days, playing a keyboard despite warning, “I’m not very great at piano.” She sang brief snippets of “That Way,” “Stupid,” and “Feel Like Shit,” just a verse and chorus each.
But she went all the way into the rager “You Broke Me First,” asking, “Who’s going through a break-up right now?” She urged the crowd, “Everybody please give it up to my incredible band up there.” (Two guys!) Yet you could also see she’s still learning to feel her way around an arena as a headliner. She even busted out the “which side of the room can scream louder” routine, which pop pros usually outgrow before the third album.
The climax was a blitz of dance bangers, with her nastiest, zippiest tunes — “Exes,” “Bloodonmyhands,” “She’s All I Wanna Be,” “It’s OK I’m OK,” and “Revolving Door,” one of the few Boston songs that’s actually about having a good time there. She signed off with “Greedy,” to cannon blasts of confetti. The smell of gunpowder was in the air, which felt appropriate for her.
Beth Saravo*
“So you came to my show to watch me,” the Tate Voice-Over Narrator mused mid-show. “But do you really see me? You show up to hear me sing, but are you listening?” That kind of uncertainty makes a cool dance-floor taunt, but at heart, it’s not really her. One of the things that makes her Tate McRae is that even when she sings about self-doubt, as in “She’s All I Wanna Be,” she sounds fearless and invincible without even worrying about it. You can’t hear, see, or feel a single moment of vulnerability when she’s onstage. And no doubt that’s exactly how she likes it.
Set List:
“Miss Possessive”
“No I’m Not in Love”
“2 Hands”
“Guilty Conscience”
“Purple Lace Bra”
“Like I Do”
“Uh Oh”
“Dear God”
“Siren Sounds”
“Greenlight”
“Nostalgia”
“This Way”
“Stupid”
“Feel Like Shit”
“You Broke Me First”
“Run for the Hills”
“Exes”
“Bloodonmyhands”
“She’s All I Wanna Be”
“Revolving Door”
“It’s OK I’m OK”
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Encore:
“Just Keep Watching”
“Sports Car”
“Greedy”
