Grimes live review – big bass, even bigger hooks

It is only when you witness this much unfettered female joy on stage that you realise how rarely it is that you see it. Grimes’s feral K-pop rave is easily the best thing to be run through a mixing desk this year, maybe longer. It is every kind of awesome.

Shrieks greet the atmospheric introductory passage, Laughing and Not Being Normal, that opens Grimes’s most recent album, Art Angels, and her set. Grimes – Claire Boucher, on her passport – then lets loose the Japanese-themed melody from Genesis, off her previous album, 2012’s Visions. Flanking her are two fierce dancers, Alison and Linda, who recall the Security of the First World, Public Enemy’s old pseudo-paramilitary helpmeets, crossed with ninjas.

Soon, she’s unleashing gut-juddering sub-bass for Realiti, crunchier, and weirder than on record. She starts Flesh Without Blood off conducting the air, strumming a guitar riff and then singing about a false friendship in a bubblegum coo. “Got a doll that looks like you,” she smiles meaningfully. Bittersweet hook after bittersweet hook plays out on her gear. The bass is carnivorously loud; HANA, Boucher’s support act-cum-band member, whacks drum pads and tosses her plaited horsetail around. The tune is huge. Everywhere you look, there are women dancing.

That pop music can be done with so much sweet, kaleidoscopic ferocity comes as a shock after a lifetime of regretfully accepting that the dead-eyed Britney version was the only way mainstream pop could work. There is no doubt that Miley Cyrus is having a ball, but you can still just see the marionette strings when she moves.

Seeing Grimes tour Art Angels, her fourth and most accessible album (released last November), is like entering a parallel universe, where riot grrrl won the World Cup, where the K-pop-worshipping PC Music scene (Sophie et al) gained control of the means of production, currently hogged by a small cabal of producers who might not have the best interests of pop starlets at heart, where Peaches is as big as Madonna.

Grimes the cult producer used to stay glued conscientiously to her equipment. In her new incarnation, she spends an hour bounding dementedly around, head-banging, running back to her workstation to start the next beat, play a keyboard line or trigger a sample. The stage set is as cheap as you like, what look like army surplus tarpaulins lit from beneath in lurid pinks and yellows, or strafed by lasers. When she’s not singing, Grimes cradles the microphone in the crook of her neck like a phone, both hands feverishly organising the live bits of the show’s playback.

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And so it goes on, euphorically, menacingly, with Grimes mixing what she calls “deep cuts” (mostly songs off her previous album, Visions) with the bulk of Art Angels, everything marinated in an enhancing dry rub of MSG cut with PCP.

A big red bow controlling a mane of blond hair, lurid turquoise T-shirt over cut-offs, she is possessed by gleeful energy. Then, between songs, Grimes becomes Boucher, a nervous young Canadian woman, embarrassed at the repeated pauses she has to take because the crowd won’t stop cheering, even when she asks us nicely. “Stop it, it makes me stressed out, I’m very shy!” she blethers. Cue more screaming. The only thing to do is to start rapping in Russian – the vocal to Scream, originally in Mandarin, by Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes.

Later in the set, for Venus Fly, the song’s martial rhythm section is multiplied tenfold. The build is monstrous; the drop, apocalyptic. The dancers have lasers shooting from their fingertips for a revamped version of Be a Body. For Go, a non-album cut that Grimes did with Blood Diamonds, they have daggers.

Soon afterwards, Grimes apologises for having swallowed her own hair. Before Oblivion, she reminds us to hydrate, and not crush our peers. (The girl behind me has already fainted.)

She plays her encore straight after the main set, because, thanks to her nerves, “Once I’m gone…” It’s easily the most explosive track off Art Angels, Kill V Maim, which may (or may not) be about The Godfather if he were a gender-bending vampire. It features the keynote chorus: “Hey, oh, don’t behave.” Hosting the pop rave of your dreams, Grimes and her crew are having a blast so palpable, so unrelenting, it actually feels like a game-changer.