Plodding pop show needs some fresh tricks
Halsey
(out of 4) At the Air Canada Centre on Oct. 4.
It shows when someone’s being rushed to the top. It shows.
I had no real opinion on Halsey heading into her Oct. 4 arena date at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre beyond a mild sense of surprise that Halsey had already been promoted to headlining an arena date at the Air Canada Centre. I left the ACC a couple of hours later with no real opinion on Halsey other than the same mild sense of surprise that the Halsey date I’d just sat through had been deemed worthy of promotion to the arena level.
I say a “mild sense of surprise” because — whatever the industry witchery that these days constructs nebulous “gold” and “platinum” certifications for albums and singles from the combined activities of YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Sunrise Records and God knows what else goes — Halsey is huge. Her 2015 debut, Badlands, went gold in Canada and platinum in the States, she notched No. 1debuts on both sides of the border for this year’s Hopeless Fountain Kingdom album and she attained something like world domination after joining forces with the Chainsmokers last year for the monster single “Closer,” which has since sold a combined five million copies in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. before one takes into account the myriad other territories where it became a hit. So, yes, Halsey is big.
Is she ready to headline her own arena tour, though? Not quite.
Wednesday’s Air Canada Centre date with openers Charli XCX and PartyNextDoor — just the second stop on the Hopeless Fountain Kingdom tour after its kickoff on Halsey’s 23rd birthday on Sept. 29 in Uncasville, Conn., since Tuesday night’s scheduled gig at Montreal’s Bell Centre got blown out “due to unforeseen production constraints at the venue” — was greeted enthusiastically by the Halsey faithful in attendance and was by no means an affront to human decency or anything, but it wasn’t the sort of performance that would make you a believer if you didn’t already believe. It was, frankly, just kinda dull. Competent and serviceable, but dull.
Halsey, born Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, is an amiable enough presence, but she’s still figuring out how not to get lost on the big-room stage and her material — which mostly plods along in the same, tormented electro-orbit as the Weeknd or Banks with considerably less distinct personality than either — isn’t yet up to the task of carrying a 90-minute show on its own.
Taken on a one-by-one basis, the tunes are fine.
When they’re delivered in bulk, however, they really start to blur together. There was so little stylistic range traversed between the very Weeknd-esque opening number “Eyes Closed” — during which Halsey descended from an illuminated staircase dominating the stage upon a cushion of dry-ice fog, and clad in a spangly two-piece bodysuit and silver heels — and late-set favourites like “Now or Never” and Young God” that the numbers that stood out tended to be the ones that broke the brooding mould. “Hold Me Down” and “Heaven in Hiding” have the punch and strident choruses to break through the fog, for instance, while the homoerotic dalliance of “Strangers” and the oozing techno-pop banger “Colors” stood out merely by being some of the few songs in the set list to provide an uptick in the perpetually brooding tempo.
A handful of costume changes, a few blasts of pyro here and there and a splash-pad satellite stage (with digital koi!) at the back of the arena copped from Beyoncé’s last tour for “Don’t Play” weren’t sufficiently high-end production tricks to distract from the fact that all of the music kinda sounded the same, while the on-again/off-again presence of a single dancer onstage wearing what looked like a bejewelled Mexican-wrestling mask and a cape was more a source of bafflement than entertainment.
The fact that Halsey’s sidemen were tucked away with their gear in the wings at stage right, as well as the singer’s noticeable reliance on canned backing vocals, also did little to give the live performance much of a “live” feel — although, that said, Halsey did a nice job of carrying “Sorry” accompanied only by her keyboardist sitting at a white grand piano so she probably doesn’t need to cheat.
Given some more time and experience, she could very well grow into her arena status. For the moment, maybe her reach extends her grasp just a little bit.