JSOnline.com Review
By: Dave Tianen - jsonline.com
It may some day come to pass that Monday night at the Pabst Theater will be seen as a milestone occasion. That night, Sara Bareilles opened her first headlining tour in Milwaukee. Bareilles is seen as an emerging star and a new template for how to break a fresh act in the digital age. In her case, it was done with free iTunes downloads of the edgy but poppy "Love Song," successful turns opening for Aqualung and James Blunt, and an aggressive video campaign on VH1. The marketing has been astute, but that shouldn't obscure something that was readily apparent at the Pabst: Bareilles is easy to like. A self-taught pianist, she's vibrant, upbeat, winsome and graced with a natural charm. Probably some of it was the career high of opening her first headlining tour, but Bareilles, 28, seemed honestly delighted to perform for her fans. When she claimed she was going to have "Milwaukee" tattooed on her butt, you were almost tempted to believe her. An artist of almost deceptive skills, she's been compared to Fiona Apple and Norah Jones, and both comparisons are valid but incomplete. Vocally, on some tunes - her anthem of escape, "Vegas," for instance - Bareilles sounded a lot like Apple. But she doesn't have even a jot of the bratty rage that can make Apple such an intense and even disconcerting concert experience. It's not that the songs lacked edge. Romantic self-deception was a kind of running theme in songs such as "Love on the Rocks" and "Between the Lines." For her encore, Bareilles first thanked the crowd for its support and then said, "To repay you, I'm going to sing a depressing song." She delivered on that promise with "Gravity," which is about how even doomed relationships can hold an allure. Like Jones, Bareilles has learned at an early age how to craft complicated adult relationships into accessible pop tunes. They are smartly written with a certain subtlety. "Love Song," for instance, was a refusal to write a love song on request and could be read as either a rebuke to a lover or her record company. A similar ambiguity was at work in "Bottle It Up." Bareilles also counts Andrew Lloyd Webber and Elton John as influences, and there was just enough of their pop sweetness to take a little of the edge off all those tart ballads. Monday was sort of ladies' night at the Pabst. Chicago singer-songwriter and pianist Rachael Yamagata shares some of Bareilles' talents, but her writing has a little more rock 'n' roll guitar punch and lyrical bluntness. She's another young writer of promise, but for some reason, she's been slow to follow up on her critically admired debut from 2004. Opening the evening were the four women of Raining Jane. Lovely, eclectic and tuneful, Raining Jane is almost certainly the only folk-pop band I've ever seen built around a combination of acoustic guitar, cello, sitar and the cajón. The cajón looks like a wooden box, which percussionist Mona Tavakoli sits on and slaps. It sounds weird, but it was kind of cool.
|
