Pop Music Blog

BY RICK MASSIMO
Journal Pop Music Writer

UNCASVILLE, Conn. - Late in the spiritual ballad "Halo," her encore at Thursday night's show at the Mohegan Sun Arena, Beyonce brought the band down to a whisper, and on the screen behind her unfurled video footage of her that she said was taken when she was five years old and had just seen Michael Jackson for the first time.

"That was the night I saw what I wanted to be," Beyonce said as part of a mid-song tribute.

Well, there'll never be another Michael Jackson. And Beyonce's dancing, while sharp and skilled, doesn't have that "did he just really DO that?!" quality that Jackson's had. But that bit of reminiscence put a lot of the pieces in place. While too many of her records still sound freeze-dried, you can't get much better these days than Beyonce in concert for a singing, dancing, elaborately costumed hybrid of pop-music performance and dance-heavy musical theatre production numbers.

Beyonce performed most of last year's I Am ... Sasha Fierce album, but started the show with older but recent hits "Crazy in Love" followed by "Naughty Girl," simmering and sinuous in the verses and banging away in the choruses, and the wonderfully nagging hook of "Freakum Dress."

The all-female band did a lot to make these songs come alive, particularly "Crazy in Love," but throughout, they gave a vintage soul and R&B (and rock, in the case of "If I Were a Boy") feel to the harmony, melody and structure, while the bottom end hit hard in true post-hip-hop R&B fashion. All the while with Beyonce's champagne-soul voice on top. While she's mostly about power and transparent highs, the way she dug into the fast melody of the verses and growls of the choruses in "Hello" were a particular highlight.

That's the formula, and it held up for most of the nearly two-and-a-half-hour show. Some of the songs from the I Am half of last year's disc (the title refers to the two sides of Beyonce's personality, and the disc is thusly roughly divided in half) had more to do with '70s soft-rock than soul, particularly "Smash Into You." But the hard-hitting Sasha Fierce material (that persona got her own segment of the show) stuck in, including the stuttering electro-drums of "Diva" ("the female version of the hustler").

About two-thirds of the way through, the singer headed out to a small platform in the middle of the arena - the better to soak up the love, I guess, but the separation from the band led to problems. The dance number to the recording of "Video Phone," with Beyonce not even singing (there was no lip-synching in that show as far as I could tell, by the way), was a serious loss of energy. A mostly acoustic version of "Irreplaceable" was nice, though, and a run through the old Destiny's Child hit "Say My Name," with Beyonce improvising on the name of an audience member, worked nicely.

Beyonce then went back to the main stage, but worked in front of a screen showing footage from the civil rights era and this year's inauguration (for "At Last") and from Beyonce's star turn in the film Dreamgirls (for "Listen"). The energy drag was palpable.

But of course, then came the irresistible bounce of "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)," preceded by a montage of YouTube videos of people doing the famous dance and elongated in the middle by a drums-only chant by the whole band. That ended the regular set, before the encore of "Halo."

 Tags  Beyoncé

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