Review: Flames, Morgan Freeman, 3 opening acts made Jelly Roll ‘a bit too much’ 

Friday evening’s Jelly Roll concert at Rupp Arena ended essentially the same way it began. The country star, reborn from hip-hop roots, was ushered through the sold-out audience to a B-stage at the other end of the venue as the skeletal frame of a house lowered around him and promptly burst into flames.

Read into that all the symbolism you like. But the finale of “Save Me” had a bonus. The fire was doused by sheets of water that poured down from atop the lighting rigs, allowing the singer to stand in his own indoor baptismal rainstorm.

Eye-catching effects. Like much of the 100-minute performance that preceded it, the resulting feel was connected keenly to the redemptive gusto in many of Jelly Roll’s recent songs and, ultimately, was grandly theatrical in presentation. It was also a bit much.

The positives to Jelly Roll’s second headlining Rupp concert in 13 months readily outweighed the excesses, to be sure. A show-opening clip — narrated by Morgan Freeman, no less — bluntly outlined a sense of welcoming and identity. “This is our space,” Freeman narrated with typically stoic grandeur.

Then after making his way across the arena floor, slapping hands with audience members and hugging patrons in wheelchairs as he passed, Jelly Roll secured himself on the B-stage, a full basketball court away from his massive band, to sing the self-help anthem “I Am Not Okay.” Then the house caught fire (for the first time) and a candid, moving moment literally went up in flames.

The rest of the performance was country perhaps by commercial definition only, but there was plenty of soul, rock and gospel to compensate along with a few excavations from Jelly Roll’s not-too-distant hip-hop past. Among the latter was “Creature,” which harkened back to the 2020 pre-stardom album “A Beautiful Disaster.” That, in turn, triggered a between-song recollection from the singer when he performed as an unknown in 2016-17 at the now defunct Lexington club Cosmic Charlie’s.

But it was through music from Jelly Roll’s two breakthrough albums, 2023’s “Whitsitt Chapel” and the recently released “Beautifully Broken,” that his redemptive country/gospel spirit was best illuminated. Songs like “She” and “Need a Favor” (both from the former record) and especially “Liar” (from the newest) typified an honest spiritual fervency that the singer owned completely.

He had help, though. Jelly Roll’s band was sharp all the way through. Two members deserve special mention. Drummer Cody Ash (a Mount Washington native and University of Louisville alum) propelled much of the concert’s rock-gospel vigor. The backbeat he summoned for “Liar” was particularly arresting. Additionally, Lee Boys co-founder Roosevelt Collier overhauled all conventional country accents for pedal steel guitar to season Jelly Roll’s music with shades of roots-savvy funk and soul inherent in his background as a sacred steel player.

The downside to all this was that the performance pushed sentiment to a sometimes overcooked extreme. The props alone – the burning house, the rains from the arena roof, a giant skull (emblematic of the themes behind “Beautifully Broken”) and, at one point, what looked like Godzilla-sized rosary beads — made the show’s atmosphere seem more Spinal Tap than spiritual.

Simply put, Jelly Roll’s songs and his accompanying performances of them sold the sense of healing and faith quite sufficiently on their own. The hard-sell gimmickry gave the whole show a somewhat bloated feel.

A similar bloat also permeated the rest of the program. It came with a lineup of three opening acts — excessive even for a country show.

None of them — ERNEST, Shaboozey or Allie Colleen — proved terribly distinctive. And that didn’t even include between-set raves from a DJ duo named Arena Rockerz that offered such insightful audience-involvement queries as “Anybody here come to see Jelly Roll?” Gee guys, I dunno.

Virginia-born hip-hop strategist Shaboozey actually has the biggest country hit of the bill at present in “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” although the less-groove conscious and more folk narrative friendly songs in his set (“East of the Massanutten,” “Let It Burn”) were more intriguing. Colleen displayed a tentativeness in her evening-opening outing that the numerous F-bombs in her songs couldn’t shake. In fairness, having to hit the Rupp stage a full 20 minutes before the concert’s advertised start time of 7 p.m. probably didn’t help.

That left ERNEST, a Nashville native known as much for songwriting as for a solo career. There were flashes of electric fire in songs like “Feet Wanna Run,” but this was mostly a serving of by-the-book pop-country conformity, harmless but antiseptic. For a singer who chooses to promote his stage name in all caps, his songs were largely lower case.

This story was originally published November 9, 2024 at 9:57 AM.