REVIEW
What: Hedley with Carly Rae Jepsen
When: Thursday
Where: Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre
Rating: 4 (out of 5)
Two acts took to the stage at the Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre on Thursday night.
Only one left with their reputation as a performer in good stead.
Vancouver-based rockers Hedley and Mission-raised pop singer Carly Rae Jepsen brought their Hello World Tour to Victoria, the second-to-last stop on what was expected to be a perfect tour pairing as it rolled across Canada.
In Victoria, the gulf between the two was much larger than anticipated.
Jepsen, a serious hitmaker during the past few years, with critical acclaim to match, has a much higher profile in the U.S. This could have made life difficult for Hedley, who occupied the top spot on the bill yet have enjoyed most of their success in Canada. That battle never came to pass. Hedley is too experienced; Jepsen, it turns out, is too slight of a challenger.
It’s clear that Jepsen sounds better on record than she does in person. Her studio output, including last year’s hugely acclaimed E·MO·TION, is very solid, but the singer and her four bandmates had difficulty reproducing her best singles Thursday. Call Me Maybe, the biggest single worldwide in 2012, came across like a throwaway, while I Really Like You — which closed her 11-song, 45-minute set — was only marginally better.
She brought some fans on stage during I Didn’t Just Come Here to Dance, which was a positive, and her Owl City collaboration, Good Time, was a bright spot. But overall, hers was not a flashy performance.
Dressed somewhat casually in a long-sleeved silver top and low-key black dress pants, she seemed tentative throughout. Perhaps that is why Jepsen didn’t offer anything in the way of a personal touch, despite calling Victoria home in 2004. It was a missed opportunity to give fans some insight into her world.
Hedley, on the other hand, produced all the right moves. Sure, theirs was a 90-minute performance packed full of predictable moments, but nothing says 10 years of experience like a group that plays to its strengths. And when it comes to fun-loving pop music that still offers something of artistic value, few in Canada can challenge Hedley.
Darkly lit piano intros, pre-recorded video bits, costume changes, Auto-Tune passages — there isn’t much of the shameless variety this band isn’t willing to try, which is admirable. It can roll with the punches, too: Opening act Francesco Yates was a late cancellation, due to strep throat, and the position of Hedley drummer Chris Crippin was filled by a late replacement as well.
The band rarely slipped, however. Even when it blew a tire with an unnecessary medley of Major Lazer’s Lean On, Justin Bieber’s Sorry, and Bruno Mars’s Uptown Funk, flat moments were few during their set.
Singer Jacob Hoggard is the star in Hedley, and his antics are the key to anything the band does well in concert (not only did he trade shirts with a fan, he called the mother of another fan and put her on speaker phone; both were wins).
Hoggard was in fine form Thursday, and the audience of 5,125 — glow sticks in motion during an utterly rambunctious Lose Control — was in game shape for all 21 songs.
It is similar to the way concerts have gone during Hedley’s decade in the game. And it’s liable to be the way it continues for as long as the band keeps turning in solid concert spectacles as it did Thursday.
