POP MUSIC REVIEW : Armatrading at Universal: All the Arranging Covers Over the Artist

Joan Armatrading isn’t about to get mistaken for Tracy Chapman these days. Though there’s little doubt that Armatrading’s former style did set the stage for the latter’s success, any Chapman fan coming to the Universal Amphitheatre on Monday to check out the new No. 1 singer’s most cited progenitor surely left wondering what the comparisons are about.

Where Chapman is a tough, unrelenting realist who sings through characters to get her gritty point across, Armatrading is a tender romantic who sings of almost nothing but the search for personal love. Where Chapman’s strong-minded “realism” may be slightly naive in its politics, Armatrading’s vulnerable “romanticism” may in fact be more realistic, reflecting human and specifically female desires in a way so uncalculatedly un-feminist it’s feminist.

And where Chapman’s music is folkishly spare, brooding and compelling, Armatrading’s current style of music is over-arranged, filled with stock topical pop sounds, and quite often a big bore.

The more Armatrading drifts toward the middle of the road, the more she’s in danger of sounding like a garden-variety romantic instead of an informed one. The unfailingly pleasant, laid-back tone of her latest album, “The Shouting Stage,” puts her dangerously close to that garden of irrelevance.

The concert did have its transfixing moments--a few with her five-piece band on some older, jazzier material, but most strikingly when Armatrading was alone with her acoustic guitar for fast-blues revisions of Van Morrison’s “Moondance” and her own “I Love It When You Call Me Names.”

This thrilling acoustic mini-set ended after a scant two songs, however, leaving her saddled with the band--and her own unimaginative arrangements--again. The raw emotions are there, somewhere, but may lie dormant under a dull pop exterior until Armatrading either accepts a strong instrumental collaborator or--better yet--goes the other direction and goes it completely alone, a la her chart-topping musical descendant.