In the name of eclectic, eccentric hip pop and R&B, Childish Gambino (the trap-rap moniker of actor/writer Donald Glover) and Willow (the winding soul/jazz vocalist/composer born of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett) filled the Wells Fargo Center with music stirringly beyond the pale, yet, indeed with recognizable touchstones.
“It’s a new verse with my old flow,” Gambino rapped during “Survive,” a track from this year’s Bando Stone & The New World in explanation, perhaps, of the evening’s programming.
For Gambino, the references now (as opposed to his radical start point in 2008) stem from the electro boom of MF Doom and the spectacle of Kanye West during his Daft Punk period. For Willow, whose 2022 album, <CopingMechanism>, heard the young Smith going off on MGK-style power punk, her winnowing tone is now jazzier and avant-garde soulful, pitched between Kate Bush and The Secret Life Of Plants-era Stevie Wonder.
Gambino’s high-voltage, high-energy, high-tech set spanned two stages, one long catwalk and a below-the-stage space from where he broadcast in black and white. Dressed in a pleather space-motorcycle suit with pointed, padded shoulders, Gambino roared through the industrial noise of “H3@RT$ W3RE M3@NT T0 F7¥” before hitting the broader stage and making jokes at the expense of his next-door neighbor that night.
“I know we probably got some angry dads out here who are probably like, ‘I should be at Bruce Springsteen right now!’” said Gambino about Citizen Bank Park’s E-Street Band show across the street. “My job is to make you forget all that.”
Forgetting Bruce might be easy for this crowd, but losing Gambino, forever? (Glover says that after this tour, he is retiring the Childish Gambino name.) Not for this Childish-devoted crowd, which knew every word to every acapella-tuned love song and every white-knuckling tech-rap tune.
From the menacingly detuned harmonies of “Survive” and the melody-warping “I. The Worst Guys” to the Seinfeld-bass-line-filled “Yoshinoya” and the panicking pulse of “Got To Be,” Gambino moved and grooved at lightning speed. High-kicking and sashaying to the beat, “Feels Like Summer” and “Human Sacrifice” were gorgeously rendered pop moments that often sounded as if three other songs were playing beneath them. (Actually, that’s a hallmark of a Gambino live show: There are so many off-tune melodies and counter-beats working within the setlist, it often feels as if he’s speaking in tongues through a different melody line.) By the time he welcomed Philly’s own Tierra Whack to the stage for a robot take on her “Moovies,” Gambino’s sound was more pointed and pronounced, as on the heavy-breathing, tribal force of “This Is America,” the deep-bass-bin-rattling “Redbone,” the rapid-fire “Freaks And Geeks” and the crunching emo rock-out of “Lithonia.”
Willow’s opening set was an entirely different vibe and design than Gambino’s noir megalopolis. With a mostly female quartet dressed, like she, in lengthy, white sheer togas—all performing below a golden, Greek-goddess statue and on a stage with wide-open sides—a barefoot Willow sang, scatted and wildly, wordlessly intoned her dreamy-yet-earthen, complex songs dedicated to love and mythology to a crowd who clung on every word and breath.
Like her new album, Empathogen, Willow and her prog orchestra effortlessly—and without warning—changed keys and shifted vibes without losing track of the tunes or improvising beyond the head. While that made “Wait A Minute!” a jarring, jazzy joy to behold with Willow’s sage poetic wisdom and high-spirited vocals spun to the front of the song, that same thrilling musicianship worked wonders on the pared-down, slowed, piano-heavy “Meet Me At Our Spot.”
What was most interesting about Willow’s set—from its honeyed “Home” opener to its flown-off-the-handle, riff-heavy “Big Feelings” finale—is that all dozen songs felt like one long, deep inhale-then-exhale. The eerily angular piano of “False Self” slipped into the stop/start serenity of “Transparentsoul” as if dipped in warm amniotic fluid. Yet, despite how radically they differed in tone and lyrical (or not-lyrical) content, they felt as much of a piece as did the yodeling, floaty “Symptom Of Life” and the free-form “No Words, 1 & 2.”
—A.D. Amorosi
