It turns out the previous Brazilian Girls show in Boston was merely a rehearsal. Back in March, the jazzy rock band sold out the Paradise Lounge, and as thrilling as that show was, it was cramped and hard to dance.
On Monday night the New York band returned to another sold-out venue, this time the club's main room, and again attracted a trendy young crowd that could have been auditioning for an
Either we caught lead singer Sabina Sciubba on a particularly good night or she was feeling the love from the sake she said the band had been drinking before the show. She was truly on fire as she twirled around the stage in layers of sheer pink and purple fabric and oversized '80s sunglasses with a dollar sign on the right lens. Announcements that she loved the audience were constant, and she seemed a long way from the aloof chanteuse who serenaded Boston last time.
''Just One of Those Things," a remix of a Blossom Dearie jazz tune the band recently contributed to ''Verve Remixed, Vol. 3," failed to catch fire on the dance floor the way it should have. Walls of echoed vocals diffused ''Sirè Nes de la Fête" until it was hard to figure out where one verse stopped and the next started.
But the highlights far outweighed the missteps. ''Corner Store" lost none of its boozy bravado, especially on the horn-driven chorus on which Sciubba played a kazoo. A new song suggested good things to come from the band, as Sciubba read text from a French book over a manic trip-hop beat that had the audience locked in a dance groove. From then on, the band hit its stride, peaking somewhere around ''Don't Stop," during which Sciubba insisted, ''It's not about me at all. It's all about us."
Tortured Soul, a jazz-funk trio from Brooklyn, opened with crowd-pleasing songs that didn't stop so much as they simply shifted tempos. The comparisons to Jamiroquai were inevitable, and no one cared that stage banter was relegated to ''Can you feel it?!" Their thunderous shout-outs suggested they did.