Zola Jesus Setlist

Taiga
Dangerous Days
Dust
In Your Nature
Hunger
Go (Blank Sea)
Sea Talk
Lawless
Nail
Long Way Down
Hollow
Night
— Encore —
Skin
Vessel

Tour Dates

01/16 – Tomorrow Never Knows Festival
01/17 – St. Louis, MO – Ready Room
01/18 – Tomorrow Never Knows Festival
01/19 – Ferndale, MI – The Loving Touch
01/20 – Columbus, OH – Skully’s
01/22 – Toronto, ON – The Drake
01/23 – Montreal, QC – Phi Centre
01/24 – Providence, RI – Fete Ballroom
01/27 – Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer
01/28 – Baltimore, MD – Ottobar
01/29 – Washington, DC – Black Cat
01/30 – Durham, NC – Motorco Music Hall
01/31 – Atlanta, GA – Terminal West
02/02 – Houston, TX – Fizgerald’s
02/03 – Austin, TX – The Mohawk
02/04 – Dallas, TX – The Loft
02/06 – Phoenix, AZ – Crescent Ballroom

Russian/American Nika Roza Danilova, or otherwise known as Zola Jesus, stopped by the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis, as part of her Taiga tour.

Ex-Dirty Projectors’ Angel Deradoorian opened up the show. We previously saw Deradoorian with another Russian/American artist Olga Bell and noted that she had more modern “Kate Bush-like siren hums and wails”, but also produced some Armenian-inspired music.

This time around, Angel brought her sister along for this tour, the two often would harmonize or dueling vocals. Their thirty minute set consists of some tribal-inspired percussions, echo effects, and a few unconventional instruments. You get the impression that the two could make anything into an instrument of music.

The story of Zola Jesus is quite interesting, she was raised in Wisconsin, among the 100+ acres of forest, and spent her youth insolated without internet and interaction with other people her age. She worked with a vocal coach when she was young, and by 10, she was performing opera. So what you see at her live shows are years of dancing performance and vocal perfection.

The stage setup had unique stage light satellite with one humongous geometric-shaped in the background. The partial paper, partial plastic shapes seemed very DIY to me, and I can picture Danilova hand making and designing these things herself.

In a typical Zola Jesus show, you can see Danilova violently dancing and trashing. It’s not uncommon to find her climbing on things (for this show, she was on top of the Cedar’s house piano). Sometime, her violent dancing caused her to accidentally fall to her knees – which I guess happened so often that she’ll sometime post photos of her bruised knees. Having seen her on stage, I can tell you it looked painful. But who am I to argue with art?

The rest of the band was tight, I got the feeling that they probably play the same set list every night. Between songs, there were often pre-recorded loops… and sometime with some strong trumpet intros. Musically, it sounded like a lost Bjork album… at least the music sounding like it was not from America.

Danilova hardly spoke, but that’s expected with these tight sets. The most words she spoke was before “Lawless”, she said, “I have a new record out called Taiga. That’s it….”

And, of course, one look at the set list, you can see that they played basically the entire Taiga (leaving out only two songs).
The middle part of her set were songs from Stridulum II and the encore was taken from her third album Conatus.

Possibly my favorite moment in the show was the a cappella intro to “Nail”. At that moment, the entire audience went absolutely quiet, clinging on to every note.

If you love Zola Jesus’ fifth studio album Taiga, you really need to see her live on tour. Part of her performance was captured from Webster Hall in New York for the music video to her latest single, “Go (Blank Sea)” – courtesy of director Mark Zemel. See it online and you’ll get an idea of what it is like to see Zola Jesus in person.

Both Go (Blank Sea) EP featuring the single b/w remixes from Diplo and Skin Town and Taiga are available commercially on Mute.