Mars is a Little Richard lookalike who is emerging as a lodestone for a time and period spanning rock and soul pop lovers dream singer. His voice is too light and his live show is a too vanilla, it is the Temptations on steroids with second banana Phillip Lawrence playing wing man and Mars taking center stage as he switches instruments and song styles in a crowd pleasing 90 minutes.
But before they hit the stage Fitz And The Tantrums actually did warm up the room Last time I met Michael Fitzgerald he was thanking me for all my help over the years, that was 2011, 2013 and he is miles away! F itz And The Tantrums are one of the best live shows around and they pretty much schooled Barclay’s on the sort of energy to bring to an arena, the band followed an excellent “Don’t Let Me Go” with a fire breathing cover of “Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This” that caught the audience and maintained the audiences attention and is certainly to their credit that they did the very difficult, they pleased the audience instead of getting themselves ignored.
Bruno blew the audience away but… Unorthodox Jukebox, an old fashioned somewhat average collection of new pop standards with its roots in r&b and a dash of 1980s rock on its fringe, has been in the charts all year with two smash hit singles already and a third on its way, this was near the beginning of an 87 date victory lap but it is too disposable, it has the spark of greatness but not the ignition.
It wasn’t terrible. With a full 8 piece band backing him up, the once pre-teen Elvis Presley impersonator had the genuine smile and the full on spectacular gainsaying va-va-va-voom of a modern day superstar. Starting with two deep album tracks off his new album -a concept he will probably reconsider later on the tour, he built to a fine all out assault on “Treasure” and the set kicked into high gear and never really went anywhere else.
But if this was a crowd pleasing exercise in pop music supremacy , it was only a partial success. Barclay Center is not the place to have cheap (cheap? that’s a joke) tickets, the sound is a metallic squeeze and the seats are so perilous somebody somewhere is gonna fall. Walking to the aisle two young girls hung on to each other and one kept saying “I don’t wanna die”. The incline is too steep and the sound system is pathetic, the acoustics atrocious, and without a melody that jumps out at you, say a “Marry You” or Bruno’s cover of “Money”, it feels like he is being thwarted.
So if you are going to Barclay’s and you can afford it, pony up the dough and get a good seat.
And even in the nosebleeds nearly every single song is as good or better than on Doo Wop And Hooligans and Unorthodox Jukebox. My problem with “When I Was Your Man” has been the generic nature of the lyric but at Barclay Center, Bruno claims it as the hardest song he has ever written and the show stopping ballad has the audience enthralled, much better than on record it is all a tense, rhythm based ballad with a stop start motion and a devastating pay off. “Just The Way You Are” was a singalong of gigantic proportions, a terrific send off before the encore. Bruno is charming and gentle, a sexy but soft persona, with the broadest of smiles and he hands the song to his audience and they take it on and run with it.
Bruno has been performing since he was 3 years old and he is a pro and he is a crowd pleaser. With his band he presents a light show flickering, mostly well paced show. But he isn’t there yet. There is a shallowness to him, an ingratiating falseness. Change to a B plus grade if you’re gonna see him at the vastly superior Prudential in Newark tonight.
Grade: B
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