Los Angeles-based singer BANKS was at the El Rey Theatre back-to-back sold-out nights on Tuesday and Wednesday as she celebrated the 10th anniversary of her debut full-length record Goddess. She celebrated the album by putting together a mini-tour where she played some of the venues that she played when the album originally dropped, marking her first appearance at the venue since May 2014.
It was crazy to realize just how few of the songs from Goddess she’s played since releasing subsequent albums. A day earlier, she played a show in London at KOKO and the setlist.fm for that website let me know that more than half of the songs were being played for the first time since 2015, a year after the record dropped.
The stage setup featured nothing but a piano and a microphone and BANKS arrived in an all-white attire with a veil over her face as she performed “Alibi”, one of the songs that hadn’t been played before this tour since 2015. She followed that up with the title track that also fit into this category.
The crowd was made up of many super fans of the record as they knew all the words to the deep cuts just like they did the hits. “Brain”, “Waiting Game”, and “Drowning” were songs that had survived into setlists for later tours. “Brain” was one of the first BANKS songs that really caught my attention, and it was actually an acoustic version of the song on the BBC Radio 1 live lounge. “Warm Water” was another song I remember seeing BANKS sing over an acoustic guitar in the back of a cab.
BANKS is releasing an unplugged version of the record on Nov. 15 called Goddess: Unplugged. I was under the impression that the shows in support of the anniversary of the record were going to be in line with the record and would be BANKS performing them with an acoustic guitar or other stripped-down production elements. Instead, it was BANKS singing over a track except for a couple of songs where she played them on piano. I remember getting to see BANKS play stripped down versions of the songs at a KROQ Red Bull Sound Space show I was lucky enough to attend and thought that’s what we were getting, so I was a little disappointed when it wasn’t quite that.
She also didn’t play the entire Goddess album but did play a couple of the songs that were on the deluxe version like “Bedroom Wall” and “Before I Ever Met You” but left out favorites like “Stick” and “Fuck Em Only We Know”. I guess the expectation is when you play a show celebrating an album anniversary, people may expect you to perform an entire record. Just a night earlier, I saw Jet play their entire debut record Get Born front-to-back.
All that being said, it was awesome seeing BANKS play songs she hadn’t played in basically a decade to a crowd of mostly die-hard fans. People all around me were singing each word to each other, pulling up their friends on FaceTime to share the joy, etc. And seeing her in the intimate El Rey was another real treat given she’s been playing much bigger venues ever since.
She finished the set by performing her new single, the house-sounding “I Hate Your Ex-Girlfriend” that shows just how different her sound was developed from the alt-R&B roots of Goddess. The next chapter of BANKS will be an interesting one to follow for sure.
Stay tuned on when the Goddess Unplugged album drops pre-orders!
Words by Mark Ortega
Photos by Justin Higuchi
