Mitski Turned Paradise Rock Club Into Just Plain Paradise

The line stretched along the Goodwill storefront; snaked around Burger Fi’s alfresco dining enclosure; extended past City Convenience, Blue State Coffee, and the Boston Playwright’s Theatre; and ended somewhere in front of Raising Cane’s. Had it been any longer, there would have been concertgoers in the middle of Harry Agganis Way, fighting off oncoming traffic. When the doors of Paradise Rock Club opened at 8 p.m., the people in line shuffled through, flashing IDs and receiving in return either bracelets or sharpied X’s on the backs of hands. They moved briskly into the shadowy main hall as feverish jazz spilled out of the speakers overhead, and they swarmed the edge of the stage, which had been fenced off for some unknown, worrisome reason. Onstage, what looked like two microphones muffled with cloth towered over the assorted instruments on tall, strangely angled stands. Even an hour before the show, Paradise Rock Club was packed, with many deeming the ground floor to be too crowded and therefore ascending to an upper level to watch comfortably.

They waited on Mitski, the New York-based singer-songwriter whose most recent album, “Puberty 2,” has caused anyone with ears to fall over and convulse out of awe and empathy. While Mitski has three other stellar albums to her name, her following has snowballed after the release of “Puberty 2,” primarily on the strength of its lead single, “Your Best American Girl.” An anthem about unresolvable longing, “Your Best American Girl” took ’90s alt-rock tropes (sonically, it’s just a slowed-down “Teenage Dirtbag” by Wheatus) and repurposed them into something more gorgeous and emotionally resonant than anything from that era. The rest of the album only goes in bolder directions. Full disclosure: “Puberty 2” happens to be this author’s Personal Album of the Year (PAOTY, pronounced “pouty,” or “peyote” for the more adventurous). Apologies for the gushing.

Mitski had two opening acts to warm up the crowd: Mal Devisa and Fear of Men. The former, stepping out with just an electric bass, enthralled the crowd the moment she began to perform. As her strums made ribcages and rafters rumble, Devisa sang words so weighty that they would not have been out of place at a slam poetry event. Her voice, however, was the true centerpiece of her set: At its quietest, it had a world-weariness that suggested ancient wisdom, yet it could abruptly shift into a piercing wail that transfixed everyone in the room. The second act had no such effect on the audience: Fear of Men comported itself sweetly with its shoegaze stylings, but its spacey soundscapes and lead singer Jessica Weiss’s twee vocal lines kept the audience at an emotional distance.

Two distinct half hours separated the three sets, and by 11 p.m., the crowd had grown ravenous for any hint of Mitski’s presence: Every time she scurried out to help set up the stage, she was greeted with desperate cheers, which quickly turned into laments once she retreated behind the curtains. At 11:15, Mitski finally strode out behind her drummer and lead guitarist. The muffled microphones turned out to be wrapped lamps, which the three tour mates switched on as they walked out; the blinding white light cast unusual shadows across the stage, lending it a thrillingly off-kilter feel. Mitski opened her set with a jam that drew from the Talking Heads’s brand of jittery punk before seamlessly segueing into a chugging rendition of “Dan the Dancer.” After a breathtaking performance of “Once More to See You,” she chatted with the audience, exuding calm and confidence. Holding up a medal, she explained that the Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine, had named her an honorary ’Poonster, before diving into “Francis Forever.”

One of the benefits of attending a Mitski show is the level of grittiness the songs attain live. On “I Don’t Smoke,” for which the white light of the wrapped lamps deepened into red, Mitski flew into her falsetto with a heartbreaking hoarseness, all while plucking heavy notes from her electric bass. With thunderous drum pad hits that seemed to physically occupy the entire club, the drummer, Casey Weissbuch, added an industrial punch to an already devastating song. Indeed, he was perhaps most responsible for fleshing out Mitski’s songs and bringing out something new and vital in them, adding an unbelievable urgency to “Thursday Girl” with his rapid fire hi-hat taps. Yet the most memorable moments involved Mitski unifying the audience through the feelings her lyrics evoked. For instance, when she belted, “Fuck you and your money” during “Drunk Walk Home,” so too did the audience, who then cheered and chuckled in pleasant disbelief. The same thing happened once more a bit later, with the line “I don’t know how I’m gonna pay rent” from “My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars.”

The feelings Mitski takes as her subject are both the most dramatic and the most universal; she deals primarily with heartbreak, unhappiness, and the quiet triumph of learning to live with both. Much of the joy of experiencing Mitski’s music, especially live, lies in hearing someone give voice to such feelings so eloquently and acutely. Admittedly, a small part of the joy lies in the fantasy that if Mitski is human yet can produce such powerful art, maybe the rest of us can do the same. However, these explanations can only be arrived at later on; as one watches her in concert, any sort of thinking melts away, yielding to the overflow of emotions.

After “closing” her set with a solo performance of the always stirring “A Burning Hill,” Mitski returned with her band for an encore, a smoldering cover of “How Deep Is Your Love” by Calvin Harris & Disciples (not the Bee Gees, though that would have been fascinating). Having watched her depart once did not make the second time around any easier. If anything, the encore offered the hope that the experience might be prolonged for a good while longer. That it was already midnight and that everyone in the club had been standing for a knee-buckling four hours was irrelevant. Over the course of an hour, Mitski had offered a glimpse of the sublime, and it almost hurt to shuffle back out into the cold, dispersed now, moving towards different destinations. Yet to have had such a transporting experience superseded any subsequent sadness.