Carly Rae Jepsen At Madison Square Garden, Wednesday, November 28th, 2012, Reviewed
Carly Rae Jepsen is the perpetually teen girl of 26 years, with billowy dresses she dances across the stage at Madison Square Garden Wednesday night to squeals of pleasure from Justin Bieber's real and actual teen girl fans. The American Idol Canada Edition star has been bubbling around since 2008 but all it took was a tween from Bieber and here we are.
THE SONG, "Call Me, Maybe" deserves to change a life, not just a really, really nifty pop song, but a pop cultural artifact for the time, that spun its web of catchy catchy hookisms just about everywhere. Amanda Palmer put it on her top ten 2012 list and the actors on Big Bang Theory performed it as a Flash Mob and that's just two examples of the US's capitulation to world domination.
Carly Rae leaves it for last and performs it as a tease, the first bars harking back to its folk song roots, and leaving the audience, who are not only young but also a little dense, not figuring out what it is. After a year of doing nothing much but sleeping and singing THE SONG, Carly Rae gives it a skipping, sweet and pleasant enough take. At some point she is gonna curse the day you wrote it but for now things are going alright. The fans are delirious, certainly neither the Owl City "Good Times" nor the new single "This Kiss" bumps the loud meter.
Over and beyond CRJ's first post THE SONG album the terrible Kiss, not really deserving of too much consideration , she isn't much of a performer. With a rock backing band, she is is engaging but bland, pretty but vacant. In other words, she is the Phillip Phillips of Canada and is received as such, a pleasant enough woman happy to bask in the spotlight.
Most of the time you can safely ignore her and not miss much but "Heart Is A Muscle" is a lousy song that interprets your Zen like peace, and "Hurts So Good" is one potential hit and she performs it… not exactly well, but, yeah, she does perform it.
