Lang’s latest album, “Sing It Loud’’ (the title track, sung Saturday as a cabaret-style anthem to personal pride and politics, was a rousing highlight) features her new touring band, the Siss Boom Bang, a stylistically supple, intuitive, and invigorating quintet that included a couple of local notables: musical director-guitarist Joe Pisapia, who played with the Tufts-bred Guster; and ex-Gigolo Aunts drummer Fred Eltringham.
Clearly having a blast with her band and her material (she performed nine of the new record’s 10 tracks during her 75-minute set), lang fed off of each’s palpable and playful energy, stalking and strutting the stage-in-the-round, mugging, and hip-swiveling like Vegas-era Elvis, and even roaming into the crowd with her self-described “chick magnet’’ (that would be a banjo) on one of the night’s few jaunty throwaways, “Sorrow Nevermore.’’
At the heart of it all, of course, was lang’s crystalline voice. Smooth as glass, sweet as nectar, and purer than most people’s intentions, the embracing instrument was equally adept at plumbing the choked emotional depths of the new “Perfect Word,’’ as well as scaling the rarified peaks of “Heaven,’’ the Talking Heads tune gorgeously reimagined as a blissful country hymn replete with Eltringham’s brushed drums and Daniel Clark’s after-hours keyboards. The breathless, Patsy Cline-meets-Peggy Lee ache of “A Sleep With No Dreaming,’’ which eased into the crooning cowboy ballad “Western Skies,’’ showcased pipes that - while sometimes pressed into service for bland adult-contempo material - were put on this earth to sing country.
But torch, twang, and seemingly everything in between were fair game (the dirty rock groove of the new “Sugar Buzz’’; Little River Band’s adorable ’70s AM radio bauble, “Reminiscing’’). Even lang’s biggest hit, “Constant Craving,’’ was ripe for reinvention. Lang subverted its sincere sense of yearning with a heavier, huskier rock treatment, dance-move hijinks, and mock ’50s greaser poses straight out of an Elvis-on-velvet painting.
The Belle Brigade, a sister-brother outfit from Los Angeles, opened with a spirited set of folk-pop songs that were by turns charmingly goofy, over-earnest, but always buoyed by the siblings’ close harmonies.
Jonathan Perry can be reached at roughems@comcast.net.
