Lido Pimienta at Botanique

Maker of the recent Miss Colombia album, Lido Pimienta, looked like a figurine on an elaborate wedding cake as she basked in Belgian fan adoration. The Rotonde room is the most intimate in Botanique, one of the prime Brussels venues, its interior set in a semi-circular tiered seating fashion. Pimienta favoured a minimalist backdrop, with exotic garlands snaking up and around her small key-console stand, and creeping across the percussion of duo-partner Brandon Valdivia.

Colombian Toronto-dweller Pimienta performed as part of Les Nuits Botanique, the sprawling annual festival that makes use of three or four stages around its impressive building and garden surrounds. Each of these gigs features two or three acts, and Rotonde is crammed to capacity for Pimienta. Her rising status revolves around palpitating, bass-heavy Colombian rap-traditional crossover songs, but also clearly stems from a response to her innate audience-wooing delivery, acting as the ultimate rouser of spirits. Sometimes this seemed like overload, but then she slipped in a witty comment that confounds accusations of inane crowd-whipping.

The songs were well-balanced between genres, with enough Colombian folkloric style – vocally and percussion-wise – but also an all-consuming sub-bass quake, allied to verbose rhyming lines. The main percussion instruments were congas, cymbals and large double-headed drum, but Valdivia sometimes fought to rise above the bombast of the backing tracks. Pimienta paced vigorously, territorialising her performance space, crouching down to hoist her lace-frilled butt up for applause-gaining rotations. Extreme reverb sounds whooshed up around the high gallery, as Pimienta shouted out “I think we’ll have no problem with Spanish tonight,” going on to observe that the English language is depressing, and that French is nonsensical.

Pimienta’s live set was way more thrusting than her recent studio output, featuring enormous electro horse-clops and frenetic vocal couplets, fully illustrating where she’s at in the face-to-face arena.