Concert Reviews

Tate McRae, Benson Boone, Meghan Trainor and more made the most of their sets at the annual holiday blast.

By Marc Hirsh

December 16, 2024 | 1:23 PM

4 minutes to read

iHeartRadio KISS 108 Jingle Ball at TD Garden with Tate McRae, Benson Boone, and others, Sunday, Dec. 15

About halfway through this year’s KISS 108 Jingle Ball, Twenty One Pilots went ahead and gave away the whole game. “On this stage, you play your biggest hits and try to be as cool as possible for 20 minutes,” said frontman Tyler Joseph, explaining the limitations and possibilities of Boston’s flagship Top 40 station’s annual Christmas concert.

The acts on the lineup don’t have the opportunity to really show what they’re capable of; their task is to take whatever they’re best at and hammer it home, deliberately and efficiently. And so seven hitmakers past, present and (in one hopeful case) future came to TD Garden on Sunday to make their cases the way Domino’s used to deliver pizza: in 30 minutes or less.

L.A. girl group KATSEYE kicked things off, tightly choreographed and clad in sparkly minidresses of Christmas red that recalled (intentionally or not) the Plastics in Mean Girls. They spun through whirring and upbeat songs like “Touch” and “Tonight I Might” with an endearing sweetness that was undercut just a hair by their frictionless glad-handing of the audience. (They continually hammered home just how thrilled they were to be in Boston until it felt suspicious.)

The Kid LAROI, meanwhile, had an actual stage setup, which in this case meant a bare-bones riser that looked good in silhouette. Just like when he played the Jingle Ball back in 2022, the Australian singer had no voice, but this time it wasn’t because he’d wrecked his voice days earlier. A technical glitch left his backing tracks loud and clear but his microphone inaudible. To the audience, at least; he performed as if completely unaware of the situation, working hard with no output. But his vocals popped out two songs in, just in time for him to Whammageddon the crowd with “Last Christmas” and navigate the shifting tempos of “Stay” without losing momentum.

Nantucket native Meghan Trainor’s only concessions to the concert’s theme were Christmas-colored dancers and the high piano chimes and hand-clappy early-’60s girl-group romping that made “Dear Future Husband” a de facto Christmas song by sound. And if the Garden swallowed up whatever subtlety “All About That Bass” once had and left only a big beat, that turned out to be enough by the standards of arena sonics.

Making zero apology, Kesha came right out of the gate recasting the iconic opening line of her signature hit as “Wake up in the morning like, [expletive] P. Diddy,” and while her trash-synth party anthems weren’t exactly in the Christmas spirit, she served as a sort of Ghost Of Parties Past, Present and Yet To Come. The sleaze-grind of “Take It Off” built to a sexual intensity a bit out of character for the Jingle Ball, and the pumping “Joyride” was, ironically, weirdly joyless (but points for the line “Get in loser for the joyride,” a deliberate Mean Girls reference this time). But the new “Delusional,” whose accompanying video featured the title spray-painted on a Cybertruck, was an effective kiss-off song in the vein of Taylor Swift’s Midnights.

Even as just a two-piece with backing tracks, Twenty One Pilots demonstrated the difference live drums can make, and had an energy and swagger unmatched by the other acts. The constant bouncing around — from instrument to instrument and from vibe to vibe, sometimes within the songs themselves — made it hard to grab onto much except their considerable intensity. But Tyler Joseph made like a busy saloon pianist as he led the crowd through singalongs of “Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town,” “Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Jingle Balls” [sic], and they returned the favor by hollering the choruses of “Ride” and “Stressed Out” back at him.

Benson Boone, on the other hand, was the night’s only act with a full, self-contained band and no apparent backing tracks, something that would have kept up the energy even without Boone throwing in cartwheels and flips (forward and back) throughout and sometimes in the middle of his songs. His songs were fairly boilerplate meat-and-potatoes pop-rock — “Young American Heart” sounded like OneRepublic playing Brandi Carlile and also like the song immediately preceding it — but he pushed his clear, pleading voice about as hard as it could go without bumping up against his ceiling, and his genuine excitement over the year he’s had made him hard to root against.

Tate McRae was another returning alum of the 2022 Jingle Ball, where she’d overworked her short set, resulting in heavily choreographed dance numbers that sometimes worked at odds with the songs they accompanied. This year, she no longer felt the need to do everything all at once, and her headlining set was all the better for it.

The trained dancer still showed off some serious moves in “Exes” and “It’s OK I’m OK,” but her backups cleared the stage for “You Broke Me First” and “Run For The Hills,” leaving McRae alone to sing her hurt effectively. They returned for the closing, confetti-blasting attitude strut of “Greedy,” of course, cementing McRae’s transformation into a more confident, complete pop star than last time. And all in just 20 minutes.

Setlist for Tate McRae at Jingle Ball, TD Garden, Dec. 15, 2024

• Exes
• It’s OK I’m OK
• You Broke Me First
• Run For The Hills
• 2 Hands
• Greedy

Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected] or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.

Source