Review | Testifying Soul-Pop Across Aisles

Officially speaking, Lauren Daigle is firmly rooted in the Christian music world, and has asserted a strong presence and a string of hits in that specialized music branch for nearly a decade. But as she amply demonstrated in concert at the Santa Barbara Bowl last week, drawing from her songbook and last year’s 23-track eponymous album, Daigle’s music is both contemporary gospel music from the source and accessible to all, regardless of religious leanings.

Daigle taps into soul-pop grooves, infectious hooks, emotional highs and lows, and power to connect a charismatic vocalist with a large crowd/congregation. She is one of many artists who remind us once again that without the deeply rooted influence of gospel music, there would be no American R&B or other areas of pop music as we know it. Never mind the preachable and Jesus-sonic moments. Daigle and her tight, dynamic 11-piece band enmeshed in an epic confetti stage set, rocked both within and beyond belief systems at the Bowl.

Not incidentally, according to Bowl volunteers, powers that be, and my own observation, the full, rapt audience which favored food and non-alcoholic choices over beer sales, won points on the “nice” factor, as Bowl shows go.

Opening act Blessing Offor, a fittingly named keyboardist singer who happens to be blind, set an ideal stage for the evening. Born in Nigeria and raised in Connecticut, Offor captivated those in the crowd who showed up early, pumping up the underlying message of “Believe” (with its hook, “believe, believe, believe”) and other winning tunes from his 2023 debut album My Tribe.

Beaming with a palpable positive spirit that wouldn’t quit, the Louisiana-born and based Daigle hit the stage amidst a gifted band, with three horns, three strong singers in the background “choir,” and a rhythm section ready for pop-soul-gospel action at a high level. From the opening song “Ego” on through the night, her voice spoke for itself musically, mixing assured and supple powers and just the right degree of subtle soulful grit in the mix. Among other moves during the 19-song set, she threw down some new old school R&B shuffle energy on “New,” and called up such hits as “Trust in You” and “O’Lord.”

Befitting the explosive tapestry of color onstage, Daigle’s current tour is dubbed the “Kaleidoscope Nights Tour,” connecting to the new song “Kaleidoscope Jesus.” The cheer-flavored old school charmer opens with the telling line, “You go out of your way to make me feel like I’m the one You love/You take on a different shape every time I see You in someone.”

On that tune and others in the Daigle book, the singer-songwriter manages the balancing act of working in poetic gray areas, interpretable through both spiritual and secular filters. Her hit from the new album, “Thank God I Do,” one of the ballads in the otherwise up-lifted Bowl setlist, has a refrain which could refer to a deity or a mortal lover: “I don’t know what I’d do if I did not know You/I’ll probably fall off the edge.”

After the song “Tremble,” Daigle launched into an emotional tribute-turned-public-prayer for the importance and nobility of caregivers, followed, aptly, by the stirring waltz-time gem “Rescue,” from her 2018 album Look Up Child. Saving the best-known song for last, Daigle closed out with her hit “You Say,” a holy crescendo to the performance, ending on the simple grace note of the statement “I believe.” At the Bowl, Daigle and company delivered a full plate of gospel truth, by whatever measure listeners and/or believers bring to the occasion.

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