“We’re calling this the Nashville invasion, y’all,” says Carrie Underwood, several songs into a set that makes you wonder what kind of fluoride they’re putting in Tennessee’s water these days. Underwood, who won the 2005 series of American Idol, is one of the most successful country singers in the US, where her albums regularly top both the mainstream and country charts, but she is a long way from Nashville tonight – and not just geographically. At times, Underwood seems to be reinventing herself using Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Jessie J as templates: she stomps, she roars; and, on a cover of Wiz Khalifa’s See You Again, she even raps. And pretty well, too.
But Underwood, whose entire UK following has probably been shoehorned into the Roundhouse for this Apple Music festival show, is still connected to country. Her Oklahoma twang caresses even the arena-rock blast of the opening salvo, Blown Away and Two Black Cadillacs, and when she imbues a cover of Randy Travis’s heartache ballad I Told You So with melancholy, it’s clear she hasn’t forgotten where she comes from.
Most tellingly, despite the Miley Cyrus-style fingerless leather gloves and short shorts, she’s as traditional as country itself, telling us she still loves to sing her first No 1 single, Jesus, Take the Wheel. She sounds like she means it, too. Moreover, Underwood consistently empathises with downwardly mobile small-towners, such as the woman working three jobs on her new single, Smoke Break, and the wronged wife whose husband is “probably slow dancing with a bleached-blond tramp” in tonight’s encore, Before He Cheats.
The penalty for this unvarnished emotion is a lack of spontaneity – the comments between songs sound scripted, and she won’t win any comedy awards. However, for a lesson in staying true to one’s roots, despite the attractions of other genres, this show does the trick nicely.
