Semi-precious stone
2 stars out of 5
HAVING notched up more than 20 million album sales in less than a decade, Jewel Kilcher is a stunningly successful pop brand in a notoriously volatile market. Neither self-consciously quirky nor vampishly in-your-face, Kilcher has risen without trace on a tide of high-school angst, self-help philosophy and anodyne melody. Trading on her wholesome Alaskan roots and chaste sexuality, she makes Dido look dangerous.
And yet her eloquent, lightly anguished neo-folk ballads have clearly struck a softly strummed chord with heartland record buyers on both sides of the Atlantic. The audience for her sell-out showcase at the Festival Hall, which marked the launch of her country-tinged new album, This Way, was certainly awash with fellow bedsit poets and devotees of quality knitwear. Most, significantly, were older than the flaxen-haired songbird on
stage.
Opening with a 40-minute solo set, Kilcher initially proved an engagingly down-to-earth performer. She joked
with photographers, then invited a pathologically keen fan onstage with his homemade scrapbook of her lyrics.
Accompanying herself on an acoustic guitar she also punctuated all this good-natured banter with some sublime vocal workouts, including the bittersweet serenade Grey Matter and the Dylanesque tumble of
Sometimes It Be That Way.
But sweetness and light are finite in their appeal. There remains something of the precocious playground show-off about Kilcher that half a decade of multiplatinum success has not quite erased. Switching expertly between masks -- coquettish ingenue, bruised lover, tremulous inner child -- she exuded the steely
professionalism of a seasoned actress. Some of her lyrical observations also felt a little glib for a 27-year-old; the melancholy middle-aged couple in her new song Rosie and Mick might belong in a Raymond Carver
anthology but they merely sounded trite and condescending in the mouth of a button-cute pop starlet.
In a performance peppered with moments of glass-shattering beauty Kilcher charmed the crowd during her solo set. But the second half of the evening was, alas, far more graceless and sterile. The singer returned with a five-piece band who played with the stiff proficiency of skilled session players, their manicured arrangements falling somewhere between country jazz and easy-listening without doing justice to any genre.
Admittedly there were sporadic flashes of soulful fragility such as the tender reading of Break Me and the spine-tingling archive favourite Hands. But behind her girl-next-door veneer, Kilcher came across as a polished product, as clinical as Britney as methodically slick as the Corrs. Only a spiteful curmudgeon would
begrudge Jewel her stunning success. But only the timid and tin-eared would find emotional depth in her watery, wishy-washy music.
Stephen Dalton
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