Playful, wistful, Sia shines on and on

Australian singer Sia (above in New York in January) performed at the Paradise amid a stage festooned with dolls, stuffed animals, rainbows, and neon sculptures. (Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)

"I don't wanna grow old/ Bring me all the toys you can find," sang Sia during the snaky, playful, and clattering "Playground." It was a single line from a single song, and yet it explained so much of her sold-out performance Wednesday at the Paradise Rock Club. Amid a stage festooned with dolls, stuffed animals, rainbows, and neon sculptures in the shapes of trees and flowers as drawn by a small child, the Australian singer was giddy with delight.

She was all too happy to share it with the audience. She and her five-piece band came out dressed in costumes that, with a blacklight trained on them, made it appear as though the self-deprecating but twitchily hooky "Buttons" was being played by brightly colored stick figures. But it was hard not to see Sia's smile beaming out from underneath her Day-Glo mask as she danced.

But despite her wide grin, constant jokes, and habit of addressing individual fans from her message boards, Sia's songs tended more toward bittersweet sentiments like the ones in the punchy "The Girl You Lost to Cocaine" and the untethered "Breathe Me." With a voice akin to a wide-awake Corinne Bailey Rae, she was practically a soul/R&B singer, with every note a struggle against both her own insecurities and the resistance of the outside world into which she was pushing them.

It was a terrific vocal performance except for Sia's enunciation, which made her incomprehensible for the quieter parts of "Soon We'll Be Found" and "Breathe Me." It was particularly noticeable at the start of the reassuring "You Have Been Loved," where it sounded like she was singing only vowels. They were rich, gorgeous vowels, though, and the song's most important lyric - "You will be loved by somebody good" - made it through loud and clear.

Har Mar Superstar opened with hyped-up, faux teen-pop wrapped quite literally in at least three layers of irony. (See: the Menudo T-shirt, "Xanadu" long-sleeve, and late-'70s/early-'80s runner's tank top that he removed throughout his set.) But with a live drummer and bassist augmenting iPod tracks, his sexy/unappealing shtick rose above simple shock value.