The Chicks review — a mesmerizing, furious rock spectacle

By Lisa Verrico, The Times

When Dixie Chicks became the Chicks in 2020, it was for PC reasons. With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, America’s most successful and controversial country band dropped the D-word for its links to slavery.

As it turned out, the timing couldn’t have been better. The name change coincided with the Texan trio’s first album in 14 years, Gaslighter, which documents frontwoman Natalie Maines’s acrimonious divorce. Her unsparing, rage-filled lyrics and the punchy production (courtesy of Taylor Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff) turned the feisty country gals into furious rock chicks.

Live, it made for a mesmerizing spectacle. After a video montage of some of rock’s most famous frontwomen and a blast of Joan Jett’s Bad Reputation, a curtain dropped to reveal Maines stood defiantly behind both her bandmates and six backing musicians, armed with an electric guitar.

Gaslighter’s gritty title track was a thumping opener accompanied by accusatory words — liar, denier — floating across three vast screens. A high-speed Sin Wagon followed as Maines, her blonde hair in a magnificent quaff, made her way to the front.

The most startling of the new songs was Julianna Calm Down, which Maines began a cappella, and on which she pleaded with herself to move on. “Strut the f*** around like you’ve got nothing to lose,” she sang as she started dancing. By the time the band had joined in, Maines was punching the air like a party-starting Pink.

The Gaslighter tracks, which made up half of a two-hour set, told the tale of a devious, cheating, money-grubbing ex. It was a shock, then, to discover during an acoustic interlude that the band’s backing guitarist was Maines’s 22-year-old son, Slade. How he felt about his mum dissing his dad wasn’t disclosed.

There were old favorites aplenty — Wide Open Spaces, a magnificent Cowboy Take Me Away and raucous closer Goodbye Earl — plus familiar Chicks covers including Beyoncé’s Daddy Lessons and Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide.

Two decades after Dixie Chicks were “cancelled” in America when Maines admonished George W Bush at a concert in London days before the invasion of Iraq, the 13-times Grammy award winners have moved on in more ways than one.