If Post Malone was going to have a coming-out party for the country side of his trap-hop/dream-pop/banger-grunge/cloud-rap persona and laconic-to-screamo vocal stylings, he couldn’t have done better than hosting Jelly Roll and turning sport spaces like Citizens Bank Park into a house party where dobros, fiddles and Allen Iverson were welcome to his Big Ass Stadium Tour.
With God as his witness and funky, musky country as his vehicle, Nashville’s Jelly Roll—more of a co-headliner, what with his CMT/CMA status—spent his set testifying to the powers of redemption and the gospel of the good groove.
A tatted-up Jelly Roll may have made his music career’s entry with Southern Comfort-ed hip hop (there were hints of that during his opening set), but with 2021’s Ballads Of The Broken, country became more than his calling. As a singer and a songwriter, it was the hand-in-glove fit that made tangy hillbilly rock outs (“Heart Of Stone”), rolling-hill rockabilly blues (“Get By”) and tear-in-your-craft-beer ballads (“I Am Not Okay”) so winning. And just in case the heathens in this readership or this Big Ass Tour’s audience had doubts when it came to a higher power, a brief rain storm stopped only to have the skies open up to a double rainbow. “You can’t tell me God ain’t real,” said Jelly Roll.
In-between that and the rainbow skies, a self-deprecating Jelly Roll asked his audience if they wanted to “see a fat man ride an imaginary pony,” introduced his drummer Pork Chop, gave his steel/pedal-steel guitarist room to breathe, yawn, wail and scream, led the crowd through a mass sing-along to “Lonely Road” (his John Denver “Country Roads” interpolation) and braced everyone for the literally holy-spirited likes of “Need A Favor” and “Save Me.”
If anyone is going to host their own stadium tour soon, it’s Jelly Roll.
Entering the stage to a loud dissonant hum, hoisting a red Solo cup and wearing a long-sleeve Eagles T (not the Philly football team; he reminded this crowd he’s a Dallas Cowboys fan), Post Malone set his kitchen-sink sound in motion with a sandpaper-y croon and the back-to-back mix of nightmare alt-pop, rolling low-house hop and flickering-campfire acoustic cuts with “Texas Tea,” “Wow” and “Better Now.”
If you were looking for anthemic country sounds with Townshend-esque, Who’s Next-worthy bridges (if you replaced his wonky Moogs with fiddles and dobros), look no further than “Wrong Ones.” Need ominously slurry bangers? “Hollywood’s Bleeding” was next on the Posty list. Could you use a heartbroken lullaby? Enter “I Fall Apart,” accompanied by the decision to film Malone’s pained screaming and shouting expressions as stage-high projections.
Welcoming his buddy Jelly Roll to the top of the catwalk stage, the two hillbilly-ed their way into the country-fried “Losers” before Post went it alone, snarlingly, through the angel-winged flutter of “Goodbyes,” the hucklebuck honky-tonk of “M-E-X-I-C-O” and the space soul of “What Don’t Belong To Me.”
By the time he got to covering Morgan Wallen’s “I Ain’t Comin’ Back” as if he and his band were the Psychedelic Furs playing at a rodeo, you assumed this would be the focused “country” portion of the concert. So out came the quietly sad and beautiful “Feeling Whitney,” a hushed brushy, deeply emotive “Yours” and the somnolently swooshing “Circles,” which—played in one brace—caused a minor-case lull. Yet, before you could truly relax with your own plastic cup, out came a mellow, hippity hoppity “White Iverson” to welcome the Philadelphia 76er of its title onstage. From there on, Posty made a party-ball splash on the monster stomp of “Dead At The Honky Tonk,” the country ruckus of “Pour Me A Drink” and the thickly grooving “I Had Some Help.”
Whether playing up to new hillbilly elegiac epiphanies or rustic-rap banger status, Post Malone had a good time, and he gives up a better time, red Solo cups included.
—A.D. Amorosi; photos by Evan Albuck (shot four nights later in Hershey, Pa.)
