Avril keeps it complicated

[staticrebelle]

Title: Avril keeps it complicated

Author: JASON ANDERSON

Publication: The Globe and Mail

Date: 11.06.2004






Avril Lavigne

At the Air Canada Centre

In Toronto on Thursday

Avril Lavigne doesn't want to make it look easy. On-stage at Toronto's Air Canada Centre on Thursday night, she acted like anything but the cheerfully plastic starlets who comprise her competition on the pop charts. Napanee's most famous export performed with an air of determination rather than exuberance.

She was more likely to kick angrily at the stage than traipse across it. Though Lavigne wasn't nearly as angst-ridden as she can seem in her videos, smiles were rare and hard-earned until she relaxed more in the second half of the 90-minute show. Nor was there a single wardrobe change, Lavigne sticking with her red tank top, black pants and ultradependable Converse sneakers. The casual ensemble left her midriff tastefully exposed, but not -- surely to the relief of the thousands of parents in attendance -- her navel. (These days, any teenaged pop star who doesn't have a pierced tongue or a snake tattooed on her belly counts as chaste.)

Lavigne recently described Ashlee Simpson's microphone malfunction on Saturday Night Live and other singers who rely on studio trickery as "pathetic," so it's her mission to be the very definition of authentic. She may be only 20 but she's a real musician, dammit. She writes her own songs, too, albeit with some assistance (co-writers on her second album Under My Skin included Canadian singer Chantal Kreviazuk and former Evanescence guitarist Ben Moody). Live on Thursday night, there was no lip-synching, even if her voice got a boost from a healthy dose of reverb. When not rocking out on her guitar, she was at the piano and even behind the drum kit for a sloppy but fun cover of Blur's Song 2.

If Lavigne has a role model, it's the prototypical punk-rocker of her parents' generation. The show opened with Lavigne's image in silhouette on a curtain, her guitar slung so low, she looked like Johnny Ramone reborn as a tiny blonde. That first song -- He Wasn't, a speedy number from Under My Skin -- even came with a very Ramones-like refrain of "hey! hey!" There was no mosh pit, but her youngest fans do enough running around already.

Not including chaperones, audience members ranged in age from 6 to 16 and were almost exclusively female -- boys presumably find all this girl-empowerment stuff icky. ("I wrote this song about being strong, standing up for yourself and not letting anyone push you around," Lavigne said at one point. Though the introduction was for Don't Tell Me, it could have been for any of her songs.)

Thankfully, the show's oddly serious air was subverted by the vitality of Lavigne's best material. The recent single My Happy Ending is the kind of song she does so well -- a sulky but strident piece of bubblegum rock blessed with an anthemic chorus. Her energetic rendition on Thursday night was suitably heroic, as was an affecting version of I'm With You, a power ballad from her first album, Let Go. Fans seemed happiest with first-album hits like Sk8ter Boi, Lavigne's infectious ode to guys with scabby knees, and Losing Grip. The latter was accompanied by a video loop of Lavigne stage-diving into an ecstatic crowd, an act that the flesh-and-blood Avril was not quite brave or foolish enough to repeat.

But this girl didn't want to just have fun. She wanted to be deep, too. Hence the arrival of a piano at centre stage and the descent of a candelabra for a mid-set sequence that included Under My Skin's Forgotten, a lumbering song that bore the influence of Evanescence's melodramatic goth-grunge. What's more, Lavigne's turn on the ivories was drowned out by the blare of her band-mates' guitars. She fared better with her solo acoustic-guitar number Tomorrow and Slipped Away, the piano ballad that closed the show on a mournful note (she wrote it for her late grandfather).

Since she performs her scrappy pop hits with such winning confidence, Lavigne's attempts to morph into a mature and sensitive singer-songwriter sometimes seemed awkward and self-conscious. You have to wonder why she has to go and make things so complicated. She may not want to be another insipid pop princess, but she doesn't have to grow up so fast.

Avril Lavigne plays Vancouver's Pacific Coliseum on Nov. 24 and Kelowna, B.C.,'s Prospera Place on Nov. 25.

[bestofavril]

t4p..

[ginger]

Lavigne recently described Ashlee Simpson's microphone malfunction on Saturday Night Live and other singers who rely on studio trickery as "pathetic," so it's her mission to be the very definition of authentic.

... Not a very nice thing to say...

T4P

[Carolann]

She may be only 20 but she's a real musician, dammit. She writes her own songs, too...

It's great to read some positive comments about her sometimes.
Thanks for posting.

[Spangel]

cool

[Elinorka]

t4p