No idling career for original "Idol" belter

Kelly Clarkson is the great equalizer. At the Paramount Thursday night, grandmas and college girls screamed "Kelllllyyy!!!" and provided fervent backup for Clarkson's every lyric. An 8-year-old and her mother stared equally adoringly at the stage, pumping their fists in the air in unison.

Clarkson's appeal lies in her aptitude for straddling fences. She is sexy but not too risqué, bouncing around for most of Thursday night in a lacy, high-cut, black bodysuit paired with a hip but wholesome peasant skirt. She drips with gritty, homespun Texas honey: Her brawny singing voice powerhoused through survival songs like "Behind These Hazel Eyes" before giving way between tunes to sugary sweet PG banter lobbed at the crowd like bubblegum tossed from a Fourth of July float. "Y'all have been a kick-butt audience!" she announced before, unbelievably, thanking not only her band, but also her makeup artist and other members of her crew.

Clarkson's songs are also a balancing act: a little bit R&B, a little bit rock 'n' roll, with her well-ornamented vocals frothing them up into near-perfect pop fizz. She whipped her dyed-blond, rock-star-cut hair around through adult rockers like "Walk Away." For the encore, her cloying American Idol single, "A Moment Like This," was reinvented as an edgier onslaught of pop-punk, complete with head-banging bridge. During what she called the "groove part of the show," Clarkson gave Joss Stone a run for her money with blue-eyed (or in Clarkson's case, hazel-eyed) soul tunes like "Thankful."

Review


Thursday night, the Paramount Theatre, Seattle

Ironically, with all of Clarkson's abilities to juggle genres and audiences, the one flaw in her performance was an occasional lack of symmetry and steadiness. The lyrics to several of her songs are slightly unstable; "Miss Independent," for instance, confuses self-sufficiency with unavailability to the point that Clarkson herself seems bewildered ("What happened to Miss Independent's no longer need to be defensive?" Whaaa?).

Vocally, Clarkson is at ease with fetchingly breathy tones and mighty, sky-high showboating — but she doesn't have much of a middle ground. On "What's Up Lonely," for example, a sleek R&B slow-burner, Clarkson jerked a little too hastily from soft to loud, as if she couldn't contain her belt any longer.

Belting fever is a common American Idol malaise, however, and, in fact, it's relatively innocuous and almost endearing when afflicting someone like Clarkson. Perhaps it's all a carefully crafted, Britney-avellian ruse, but she still comes off like the girl-next-door who can't believe her luck. Kelly Clarkson is the "American Idol" project that worked — a truly talented singer who is fresh and fresh-faced enough to become America's multidemographic, multigenre sweetheart.