3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Post Malone navigated a very damp night for a sold out crowd at Gillette
That might have been necessary to buy in to the scale of the production. With booming, busy drums and lurching guitar squeals, plenty of numbers leaned on sound and fury and signified not much, and the flame bursts and fireworks that punctuated songs like 'Rockstar' simply underlined his band's churning sensory-overload maximalism. With its late-'70s adult-contemporary tinkly-piano sound, 'What Don't Belong To Me' was soft rock, but loud. The rolling cut-time country of 'M-E-X-I-C-O,' meanwhile, was energetic but not particularly convincing.
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But if the singer's recent Nashville pivot may have been mercenary in nature, it also came off as dopily genuine; Malone's great gift as a pop star is his utter inability to radiate anything but sincerity. Leaning into a rasp and a twang, he pulled off the big-spectacle country of 'Wrong Ones' better than a lot of big-spectacle country stars, and the straight-up heartstring-tugger 'Yours' imagined the wedding of his three-year-old daughter, a country theme if ever there was one.
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Even if he didn't slip or fall, Malone's performance didn't always have sure footing. His voice was sometimes more robust than on record, as on a more dynamic 'Better Now,' and sometimes it was even more warbly and thin. He inserted 'Boston' into the lyrics of 'M-E-X-I-C-O' and Morgan Wallen's 'I Ain't Comin' Back,' and it flew by so quickly in both cases that either nobody noticed or nobody cared.
Still, Malone's affability was so strong that he could bring a fan in a Dallas Cowboys jersey onstage to perform with him and get the crowd to stop booing long enough for him to sing the almost delicate 'Feeling Whitney' accompanied only by her fingerpicking on acoustic guitar. (The booing recommenced after.) And as he returned from the rigging at the back of the stadium where he sang the encore, he stopped to sign autographs and pose for selfies along the way as his band pounded out the post-rock scope of 'Congratulations.' 'As long as you ain't hurting nobody, keep being yourself,' he concluded, advice that's worked out pretty well for Post Malone.
Jelly Roll performs at Gillette Stadium.
Ben Stas for The Boston Globe/The Boston Globe
Malone's steel-guitar player Chandler Walters opened with amiable but personality-light country that could've come from any of the last five decades, complete with a medley of
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POST MALONE
With Jelly Roll and Chandler Walters
At: Gillette Stadium, Saturday
Marc Hirsh can be reached at officialmarc@ or on Bluesky @
