Carrie Underwood emerged in St. Paul Monday night atop a wedding cake in what looked like a prom dress designed for Tim Burton's "Nightmare at Xcel Energy Center."
Suddenly an AC/DC concert broke out. Or was it Bon Jovi? Or Def Leppard?
Shania Twain may have introduced the arena-rock drum sound to country music in the 1990s. But on Monday on her Storyteller Tour, Underwood's band roared as loudly as her voice. And she's been country's best screamer for a decade — if not of all time.
In fact, this was the first Underwood headline concert in the Twin Cities when a detractor couldn't accuse her of relying on vocal gymnastics with no emotional buildup to justify the explosive crescendo. Everything about her music on Monday was about a big bang.
Underwood's opening six songs were like a mullet-rock assault, with her eight-member band rocking and roaring in overdrive. The singer banged on kettle drums on "Church Bells," and fireworks spewed out of a jukebox during "Cowboy Casanova." No wonder Underwood, later in the concert, donned a T-shirt emblazoned with "Rock Star Chic."
Befitting Underwood's newly adopted rock-chick persona, she had a production as ambitious as any A-list rock star. Her in-the-round staging actually featured sort of a three-ring circus. The center stage rotated and went up and down, allowing her and her musicians to be on different levels at the same time.
Add in stage fog, faux flames, explosions, her hand-held bejeweled Carrie Cam, and enough sequins and rhinestones to open a Nashville costume shop.
Intermittently a country concert broke out, reminding the 16,000 fans that Underwood, now 33, jumped from "American Idol" to the top of the country charts without trying to be Nashville's answer to Mariah Carey. She dialed it down for "Heartbreat," her No. 1 ballad from last year, and proved her vocal and country bona fides on an assuredly understated reading of "I Will Always Love You," which hued closer to the Dolly Parton original than Whitney Houston's stratospheric pop rendition.
Underwood underscored her country roots with a peppy reading of Alabama's "Mountain Music." And she flashed back to early in her own career with 2006's "Before He Cheats," a once-ebullient number that now sounds thin compared to her new material, and 2008's "All American Girl," a bubble-gum country-pop ode to "that sweet little beautiful, wonderful, perfect all-American girl" that she used to be.
Even though she offered a sentimental family portrait of her young son and husband on "What I Never Knew I Always Wanted," she asserted a new Carrie on the swampy "Choctaw County Affair," featuring her bluesy harmonica, and on "Clock Don't Stop," which suggested powerhouse Welsh rockers Florence + the Machine. They were among the eight songs from her 2015 "Storyteller" album that were part of Monday's 105-minute performance.
Underwood even pulled off the rocker persona with her speaking voice, which sounded a little raspy. With all these rock-star affectations and aspirations, one could almost believe that the sweetheart of country music had some firsthand knowledge about all those he-done-me-wrong songs that she sings. Naw, that's about as believable as Taylor Swift as a New York City sophisticate.
Twitter: @Jon Bream • 612-673-1719
