Lavigne showcases her many personas and a can-do spirit
At 23, there's no reason to expect Avril Lavigne has figured out who she wants to be yet.
Tuesday night at Agganis Arena, the diminutive Canadian vocalist displayed the various guises - teeny-bopper dance queen, junior Joan Jett, pint-size Celine Dion - that have helped her reliably scale the charts since 2002. She whirled from crackling bubblegum to revved-up power pop with a smudge of Hot Topic punk. Although Lavigne's voice is formidable, her identity falls hazily somewhere between the margins. She flailed at her guitar and snarled with technical precision on rockers like "I Always Get What I Want."
But tender ballads of confusion like "I'm With You" or assertiveness like "Don't Tell Me" felt truer somehow and resonated with the young women, who filled about three-quarters of the arena alongside a smattering of boyfriends and dads, raising their voices in similar yearning.
Lavigne also has yet to unlock her most comfortable stage persona, veering from awkward dance moves to aimless meandering, although she was strongest with an instrument at hand, melding and harmonizing with her five-piece band.
She moved from set piece to set piece with due diligence and a big smile but not a lot of detectable joy or emotion, dispatching nearly 20 songs in 75 efficient minutes.
Only when she sat at her pink baby grand and laid out her heart on the simple but aching "When You're Gone" did it seem that the real Lavigne peeked out from behind the bratty affectations. While her rhyming vocabulary isn't particularly vast, the honesty of lyrics like "I've never felt this way before/Everything that I do/Reminds me of you/And the clothes you left/they lie on the floor/And they smell just like you/I love the things that you do" felt more relatable than the manicured grime of "I Don't Have to Try."
That righteous display of dominance was somewhat undercut by the synchronized moves of the ripped-leather-clad dancers behind her, looking about as ferocious as a road company of "West Side Story."
As Lavigne continues her search, parents and pop music fans could do a lot worse for a role model than a young woman who doesn't crassly trade on her sexuality, writes catchy songs, and sings with strength about power and vulnerability.
Judging by the ratio of Boys Like Girls to Avril Lavigne T-shirts on display, it's clear that the local rockers are gaining fast on their headliner.
