:: Sarah Slean @ Beale Auditorium by: (Saturday, March 26) Sarah Slean is the new golden age of Tori Amos. Musically she does her own thing, but concert-wise she draws you in and runs with you under, over, and upside down the way Tori did before she hit the big time and started charging $70 for tank tops at her merch tables. The comparison’s been made times beyond tired but there’s a reason for that. From the moment Slean creeps barefoot onto the stage of Beale High School Auditorium she has everyone in the palms of her china-white hands with a simple theatre-hugging stretch of the arms and a huge welcome kiss hello. All smiles and sparkle, she slips her black-halter-dressed self behind a tiny center stage keyboard and digs straight into Lucky Me, the second track from her still new-ish album Day One. A flourish of finish. A hidden grin. Slean flips her hair to the side and peers out at the crowd, up through the rows of angled seating with a sneaky little smile. "It’s not the Outback Shack," she says soft and happy, referring to Fanshawe’s cement cafeteria where she played with Victoria folkie Jeremy Fisher last month. "HALLELUJAH!" Everyone laughs and she throws herself back at the keys for Out in the Park, where she thrashes like a deranged pixie OD’d on faerie dust. Every time I see the girl I’m convinced THIS will be the night she accidentally smashes her head off one of her pianos and knocks herself out of a tour, but it doesn’t end up happening on this particular night (though mark my words –she gets precariously close and one of these days…). "You knooooooooooow," she thinks aloud. "You caaaaaaaan come up and dance…" This suggestion accompanies the opening bars of Day One, the first single off the new album –a catchy, theatrical piece of semi-circus tune-age that’s impossible as sunshine to hate. The crowd looks at each other. Surveys the scene. Sizes up the dance-ability factor of the song. High. They rise, en masse, and run to the edge of the stage where, against the well-lit show, their silhouettes jump, jive and jerk around like some sort of creepy midnight dance troupe. After a few more songs, and the ever-to-be-expected stories that always come sandwiched between them, Slean’s band moves to leave the stage but not before she riles a few front-row girlies by wrapping her arms around the shoulders of the attractively Jeff-Goldblum-with-an-indie-twist bassist, Peter Fusco. "Isn’t he sexy?" she jokes. There are smiles. A pause. A male voice. "He’s all right." A collective collapse into laughter. Still laughing, Slean wanders over to a huge old wooden piano at stage right, and sits. A single spotlight trained on the bench casts her black dress and pale skin in shades of blue and silver, further hypnotizing her audience as she starts a series of slow, torch-y songs that shiver in the air before they grab you by the shoulders and shake. Listening to Slean’s records is one thing, but live she is something else entirely. One second she’s this translucent little sprite watching quavering ballads steal away from her own lips; the next her head hinges back to open her throat for a voice that rockets like canons to own the rooms she sings in. It’s an incredible zero to sixty in .2 seconds. Three songs later her band reclaims their positions onstage for a few set-closing songs, much to the upset of the audience, but Slean turns her head and looks at them with tease in her eyes. "Weeeeeeeelllllll," she hints, "You never know. If you…dance and stuff we might come back." Most of the dancers are still stationed in front of the stage and those that aren’t get there fast so as to pre-emptively entice her back with their Sweet Ones high-stepping. For an ovation-induced encore (and I gotta ask why people throw these around so fast and loose these days –I mean it was a good show but does everything get a standing O anymore?) Slean and her boys thunder through Bank Accounts and Drastic Measures, both from 2002’s Night Bugs, before bringing it back to the present with an extenda-version of the Day One-closing Wake Up. This lullaby-like conclusion gets her dozens of dancing minions singing the chorus back to her as she rocks above them in a chill-out sway that seems necessary to pacify everyone after the frenzied ballet of the last few songs. Sixty to zero in .2 seconds. Emotional overdose without the inflation. Here’s hoping Sarah stays not Tori in all her own respects.