Charlie Puth woos his young, YouTube fan base with old-fashioned pop sounds
He may be a product of the YouTube age, but piano-pounding popster Charlie Puth hews to old-school pop sounds, on full display Monday at the TLA.
Charlie Puth may be a 24-year-old, piano-pounding pop sensation from Rumson, N.J., whose roots go as far back as ... YouTube, and whose gossipy connections include rumored hookups with Selena Gomez, but the songs he writes and the sounds he makes are the workings of a very old soul. At least one older than Gomez.
While Puth's lyrics reference the ageless pains of romance and smooth R&B legends ("Marvin Gaye"), his buoyant melodies - on full display at a sold-out-to-the-rafters show at South Street's Theatre of Living Arts on Monday night - nod to quintessentially classic pop perfectionists Billy Joel, Todd Rundgren and George Gershwin. Puth also has serious chops: Manhattan School of Music as a jazz piano major, full scholarship to Berklee College of Music.
But in concert - with his baggy, stretched-out T-shirt and tall, sweaty mop of wavy hair - Puth looked like the kid who mows your lawn, albeit with a pricey Husqvarna mower. He talked to his tight trio as if they were his soccer team buds and addressed the screaming 'tween girls in the audience (and their moms at the bar) as if he was speaking to his high school classmates at a parent-teacher assembly.
Heck, someone even invited Puth to be their prom date.
Starting with the aforementioned "Marvin Gaye," Puth and his posse showed just how arcane he was willing to be by splintering its pure pop with honky-tonk runs along the 88s and even a snippet of "New York State of Mind" in its intro. Then again, its chorus was graceless and ungainly ("let's Marvin Gaye and get it on").
From there, Puth's high, enthusiastic voice bunny-hopped across ripples of doo-wop harmony, prancing bass lines and a cosmopolitan jazz melody on "Dangerously" and the swinging tribal rhythms of "Some Type of Love." Jamming good on optimistic pop with old-fashioned sentimentality (the "drink champagne" and "singing in the pouring rain" of "My Gospel") and doing ads for local eateries ("Ishkabibbles is where I'm gonna get my chicken cheesesteak after the show"), Puth laid it on thick whenever he had the chance.
The falsetto-flitting "Losing my Mind," the '80s television show-theme-y "Left Right Left," the corny, scat-soul-Calypso "We Don't Talk Anymore" - these and more proved that in a world where slick pop comes down to who can AutoTune best, Puth prefers to dip into the Tin Pan Alley pool like a modern-day Peter Allen.