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“Tonight is going to be so much f—–g fun,” 21-year-old singer-songwriter Olivia Rodrigo promised the mostly very young, mostly purple-clad audience that assembled at Climate Pledge Arena last night. It felt funny, though, that “f—— fun” was posed as something to be subsequently had: the crowd and I were already having plenty of it during “Bad Idea, Right?” and “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl,” the pair of rip-roaring, hilariously self-lacerating songs that kicked off a concert that went opener-less and refreshingly began two minutes early.

The rousing one-two punch of the show’s start proved to be something of a headbanging high intermittently longed for at a concert that inevitably couldn’t exclusively maintain that exhilaration. Rodrigo is, to my eye, most magnetic as a performer and recording artist when in a scenery-chewing rock star’s pose more indulged on her lively, sharp-witted sophomore album, last year’s Guts, than her heartbreak-fresh debut, 2021’s Sour. But the inescapable reality is that she’s released many more concert-slowing, in-her-feelings ballads that make you want to wistfully sit in front of a window. (One, of course, catapulted her at 17 from Disney Channel up-and-comer to revered international name, after all.) 

Read the full review at 425.