"I'm going to be honest with y'all," Fatimah Warner said midway through the second song of her Field Trip set. "I drank a lot of whiskey before I came up onstage, so I'm a little tipsy."
You wouldn't know it from her flows, which maintained a breathless pace and conversational cadence through to the end of her encore. If anything betrayed that Warner was even a little bit blitzed, it was her exuberance. The Chicago poet and rapper who records as Noname ran through a brisk set that represented both new material and choice cuts from 2016's stellar Telefone mixtape, playfully chiding the audience to keep the beat and sing louder.
Her five-piece band added heft to breezy arrangements, while Warner herself filled in missing features with fierce new verses, such as a passage on "Diddy Bop" that linked late capitalism and toxic masculinity. The setting sun over the Fort York stage provided the perfect environment for Noname, an artist whose music balances wistfulness, pain, and excitement in equal measure.
You wouldn't know it from her flows, which maintained a breathless pace and conversational cadence through to the end of her encore. If anything betrayed that Warner was even a little bit blitzed, it was her exuberance. The Chicago poet and rapper who records as Noname ran through a brisk set that represented both new material and choice cuts from 2016's stellar Telefone mixtape, playfully chiding the audience to keep the beat and sing louder.
Her five-piece band added heft to breezy arrangements, while Warner herself filled in missing features with fierce new verses, such as a passage on "Diddy Bop" that linked late capitalism and toxic masculinity. The setting sun over the Fort York stage provided the perfect environment for Noname, an artist whose music balances wistfulness, pain, and excitement in equal measure.