Review

Who: Twenty One Pilots When: Saturday Where: Mandalay Bay Events Center Grade: A-

Joining Joseph on the front lines of this battle within his brain was an infantry of thousands, many of them teenagers or younger, flanked by moms and dads, a number of whom would probably be trekking to CVS the next morning for throatsoothing Sucrets after their kids had screamed themselves hoarse the night before.

“We have problems,” they shouted in unison during “Polarize.”

“We are broken people,” they sang during “Screen,” drowning out the band.

In the most ironic moment of the evening, this largely adolescent crowd lustily lent their voices to one of the band’s biggest hits, “Stressed Out,” a song about longing for a return to the “good old days” of … adolescence.

That this young audience connected so passionately with sentiments that could just as well as have been expressed by the parents at their side was a testament to Joseph’s skill at turning his inner turmoil outward.

Now, making the personal universal is nothing new — it’s what songwriters have been doing since the advent of song. But Joseph does so in a way highly specific to his generation, the first to come of age in the era of social media, where no detail of one’s being is too small to be shared with the world via Facebook and Twitter, right down to what you had for lunch.

The flip side of all this is that it also opens up even the smallest aspects of day-to-day living to potentially withering scrutiny, and the internalization of all this is the engine that drives Twenty One Pilots.

Joseph, the band’s songwriter, doesn’t lash out at the world around him, doesn’t rebel against authority figures, doesn’t swear in song.

This is not angry music — it’s the opposite in fact, heavily reggaetinged, with laid-back Caribbean rhythms coaxing you to relax, even if Joseph’s words can tend to have the opposite effect, whether delivered via conversational rhymes, through a Jamaican patois or sung pleadingly.

Joseph frequently gives voice to existential angst — “Oh dear, I don’t know if we know why we’re here,” he chirped on “Car Radio” — but he does in a consistently buoyant setting, the band’s assimilationist sound a melange of pop, hip-hop, electronic dance music and arena rock bluster, drummer Josh Dun pistoning up-and-down on his kit like a human crankshaft as Joseph alternated between piano, bass and ukulele.

They’re a genre-less duo for genre-less times, skilled multitaskers who labor to reduce the barriers between artist and audience, with Dun performing with his kit positioned right in the crowd during “Ride” and Joseph traversing fans’ outstretched arms while encased in a large plastic bubble at the end of “Guns for Hands.” He played the “Mario Kart” video game on stage with a fan at one point, and suddenly appeared in the stands to rap his lines to “Hometown” early in the show.

Toward the end of the night, Joseph encouraged the crowd to “send us an email or something” if they wanted the band to return for another concert.

Of course, that’s not exactly how these things work, but his point was to highlight his band’s accessibility, even if that becomes difficult to sustain as Twenty One Pilots have grown into full-fledged superstars via their most recent record, the double-platinum “Blurryface.”

To this end, Joseph and Dun put their ski masks back on as the 24song, two-hour show worked its way toward its conclusion.

Unlike other rock star stage get-ups, they weren’t intended to transform these two into largerthan-life characters.

Instead, it was meant to render them feature-less, so that they could be anybody, blank slates that the audience could project themselves upon.

As the crowd filtered out of the arena after the show, throngs of fans sported the same red headgear that Joseph and Dun had, a means of insulating themselves from the chill of a rainy Saturday night and life alike. Read more from Jason Bracelin at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com and follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.