Perfume @ The Theatre at Ace 4/19/20
At the intersection of pop idols and virtual stars lies Perfume’s live show, a thrill unlike any other.
To remind the audience of their legacy, the tour opens with a pixelated satellite image of Japan set upon a scrim. It flashed through any and all Perfume-related accomplishments over the course of their career, from album releases to seminal performances. When they appeared behind the scrim for “Start-Up”, Perfume found themselves thrust into a Star Fox/railshooter-type environment – as the scrim fell away by track two, “Future Pop”, wigs came down with it.
The music may look and sound cutesy, but the bass rattled your atoms to the core. Bouncing to these titanic beats, Perfume sang and danced with robotic efficiency. The performance blurred the lines between woman and machine, where the synchronicity of idol groups meets the digital perfection of Hatsune Miku. After 20 years of performing, Perfume have this routine down to a science, and I’m grateful to have experienced my first J-Pop show with them.
“We believe our future is bright,” A-chan said, and they gave us no reason to doubt them.