He entered dangling by a helicopter, blew off enough pyro to fly a rocket to the International Space Station and generally did not spare any expense in creating a visual spectacle for his first Twin Cities arena-headlining concert.
Now if only Machine Gun Kelly had hired an actual backup vocalist or hype-man rapper instead of relying so heavily on prerecorded vocals during his high-energy but weirdly whiny performance Thursday night at Xcel Energy Center.
Throughout the 105-minute set by the Cleveland-raised rapper-turned-pop-rocker, extra vocal parts could be prominently heard in the speakers singing and rapping the choruses to his songs. Those parts were not delivered by his backup musicians, who had enough work to do just navigating the steeply sloped, checkered stage he devised for them to play on.
During the song "Drunk Face" early in the show — admittedly one it'd be easy to lose interest in singing — those other voices went on and on while MGK himself repeatedly took drags from a cigarette. MGK's own "live" voice could be easily picked out, since it sounded hoarse and ragged all night.
For more reasons than all the overhanded, augmented pre-production, it was hard to take the real-life Colson Baker, 32, as seriously as he wants to be. He practically begged for it Thursday, in fact.
The concert started with a video of him complaining about "being put in a box," during which — get this! — he was actually inside a cardboard box. Then in the second half, he kept verbally battling with a giant inflated man looming over the stage with a computer for a head, which he venomously referred to as "the internet" and "the box."
"If the internet was right about Machine Gun Kelly, when the lights go on nobody would be here," he harrumphed at one point.
To his credit, MGK did face a big crowd of nearly 14,000 fans. That's quite a jump from playing clubs and opening slots pre-COVID and then headlining the Armory last year.
