You can’t fault the drive or determination of Alessia Cara. From the moment she started uploading covers to YouTube from her bedroom aged 13, the Canadian artist has grown from a teen superstar to an R&B-pop force of nature.
At 19, she already has a top 10 US album, Know-It-All, under her belt, but she looks far from a pop-cultural powerhouse tonight. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with her hair scraped back, she looks as if she is en route to the gym rather than a star fielding the screams of her devoted young fans.
Modest appearance aside, it is simple to see why her music has such appeal. She sings about the doubts and worries that beset teens, and she does so in a rich and soulful voice over sleek, killer pop tunes. The hiccupping electropop of Seventeen finds Cara musing on intimations of mortality in youth, dreading winter during spring: “I wish I could freeze the time at 17.”
Luckily, Cara has enough charisma to get away with her earnest between-song patter, including shoutouts to record label execs. A slick motivational speech introduces Scars to Your Beautiful, an anti-plastic surgery female-empowerment anthem, delivered in a Beyoncé-like pitch-perfect stentorian warble.
She closes an upbeat set with her US breakthrough hit, Here, a moody rumination on feeling alienated at a house party, even though her self-depiction as an “antisocial pessimist” is hard to square with the eager-to-please beacon of positivity before us – an especially confusing label, considering she ends the set by jumping into the crowd, to work the room just that little bit more.
- At Sound Control, Manchester, on 24 March. Box office: 0161-236 0340. At the O2 Institute, Birmingham, on 25 March. Box office: 0121-631 1800.
