Kali Uchis transported Red Rocks into her own world: Review

Kali Uchis barely had time to talk during her Red Rocks debut.

The 31-year-old Colombian-American singer powered through more than 30 songs in just over 90 minutes during her May 26 visit to Red Rocks on her For the Girls tour. It was a showcase for a rare talent whose music spans multiple genres and languages.

Before Uchis took the stage, there were back-to-back sets from Laila! and Mariah the Scientist. The former — notably the daughter of Yasiin Bey, formerly Mos Def — ran through a collection of SZA-indebted bedroom pop numbers complete with a Y2K-inspired visuals that riffed on everything from early band websites to the Home Shopping Network. The arriving concertgoers echoed the aesthetic, dressed either as approximations of Uchis as she appears on the covers of her five studio albums or as extras from “Mean Girls.”

From there, Mariah the Scientist elicited a reaction worthy of a headliner during her 40-minute set.

“Are you ready to turn up?” she asked the crowd before launching into “All for Me,” to which it responded with a massive scream.

Her band, complete with a collection of pink instruments and costumes that looked like triple-breasted cruise employee uniforms, found ways to juice up the singer’s no-frills R&B with additional guitar solos and drum fills that added a level of pizzazz to her otherwise relaxed set.

Uchis took the stage a shade before nine, dressed in a rhinestone corset and surrounded by backup dancers fanning her with feathers reminiscent of those from the cover of “Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios)” as she sang a stripped-back, shortened version of “telepatía,” the album’s biggest hit.

She barely spoke with the audience through the first 10 songs, save for a “hello, Denver.” She skulked across the stage as she performed an extra sultry version of “Moonlight” and wove in between her team of backup dancers during her reggaeton hit “Labios Mordidos.” One minute, she danced atop a giant circular bed; the next, her backup dancers surrounded her with mirrors as she performed to a camera attached to the rafters. Then, all of a sudden, she’s in the second row of the crowd.

The lighting and production were equally chaotic. The stage acted as a three-tiered LCD screen — projecting everything from ocean waves to a Barbie-inspired dream house. Two-thirds of the way through the set, a montage of Uchis’s home videos, interspersed with shots of other Latin Americans, played over a voice-over by the singer as she spoke about the hardworking nature of her family and the immigrant community as a whole in the United States. “Without immigrants, there is no America,” her voiceover concluded to one of the largest cheers of the evening.

After that, it was right back to the madness, crooning on the back of a motorcycle or pretending to fire a rhinestone-encrusted pistol as she sang a collection of cuts from last year’s Sincerely.

“My manager said, ‘We’re playing Denver,’ and I said, ‘I don’t think anyone is going to go, I was just there,’” said Uchis, in a rare aside referencing her show at Ball Arena almost exactly eight months ago.

As she closed out the evening with “telepatía” — this time with the full band — you could tell by the full voice of the sold-out Red Rocks crowd that everyone disagreed; it had been too long.