The Fairgrounds at the Salt Shed sits on the river side of the compound and holds the cold off the water from about eight o'clock, which in mid-September means a crowd that arrived in summer clothes and regretted it. Tove Lo played on Wednesday September 16th, opening the venue's autumn outdoor run.

She has spent twelve years writing pop songs with the sex and the damage left in, for an audience that mostly found her through other people's records. Nobody at the barrier needed that explained.

Mallrat supported — an Australian act with a quieter register, which on an outdoor stage against a brick warehouse is a harder sell than it would be indoors and worked better than it should have. She played to a yard that was still filling, which is the support slot’s permanent injury, and did not hurry to compensate for it.

The Set Had Something New In It

This was the ESTRUS run, and the interesting decision was to put an unreleased track into it. "I'm the Cake" has not been issued and she played it anyway, to a crowd that could not sing along and therefore had to listen, which is the rarest condition at a pop show.

"2 Die 4" was the loudest the night got, built on a sample that does most of the work and does it well outdoors where the low end has somewhere to go. The staging was minimal by arena-pop standards — the warehouse behind her is the set design and the production knew it.

A Salt Warehouse With A River Behind It

The Morton Salt Company stored road salt in this shed from 1929, and the pile inside was visible from the Kennedy for most of the twentieth century. The conversion kept the building's volume rather than carving it up, and the outdoor Fairgrounds beside it is simply the yard the trucks used to load in.

What that gives a pop show is a hard vertical surface at the back of the stage and the river at your shoulder, so the sound has one reflective wall and one dead side. It is an accident of industrial geometry and it flatters a synth-led record more than a purpose-built shed does.

Chicago Music Guide had the professional frames out the following day. An unreleased song got played to four thousand people who could not join in.

Cover image: Morton Salt complex, Goose Island / Wikimedia Commons