POP MUSIC REVIEW : Torch Singer Sade Too Happy to Scorch

Fans with a penchant for bad Beatles puns may know her as Sexy Sade. But at the Universal Amphitheatre on Wednesday, Sade Adu--perhaps the most prominent of modern torch singers--seemed to be having much too good a time to keep any charade of sheer sultriness up for long.

After a while, Goofy S a de was almost more like it, if only for the transparent grin that kept appearing on Adu’s face, even in some of the less cheerful numbers.

“You see what you’re doing for me,” she confessed sheepishly after the second number, looking not at all like the thrush-in-the-throes-of-passion of her album cover portraits. “My smile’s too big for my face, and that’s not good.”

The proportion wasn’t nearly so off as Adu figured, and she and her band--which operates under the name Sade--had plenty of reason to be so happy, even withstanding the rousing crowd response.

After an almost four-year absence from public view, their latest album, “Love Deluxe,” debuted in the Top 10 and several months later claims a chart position 40 spots higher than the Madonna album released about the same time. And in a soft touring season the group has sold out its American tour, of which the two-night Universal stand was the fourth stop. (They play tonight at San Diego’s Symphony Hall.)

Ultimately, Sade makes a better recording phenomenon than live act, or at least a purer one. Adu isn’t quite good enough an actress to really overpower you with the emotion of these songs in concert.

Even when the smiles faded and the singer made a more determinedly theatrical effort to put the tunes across, a lot of the grand gestures she occasionally used to connect with the big hall seemed strained, coming straight from rehearsal and not necessarily feel.

Yet if she doesn’t quite have it in her to effectively play the tortured songstress some of the ballads require her to be, Adu was sufficiently winning in her own way, exuding a certain sweetness and even a kind of shyness that’s profoundly surprising.

The combination of her exotic beauty and assuredly smoky voice with her humility of speech and tentativeness in executing some of the more show-bizzy moves gives you the impression her stardom hasn’t sunk in too deeply yet, even at this late date, and that’s a quality nigh impossible not to like.

Sade works within a narrow dynamic range, but they do mine it with admirable proficiency. Adu doesn’t stretch much as a vocalist, but knows that the few times she does go for big notes at a climax (as in the “Hallelujah” section of “Pearls,” the new album’s big social-consciousness anthem), it’s much more effective for her having underplayed things the other brooding and insinuating 97% of the time.

The eight-piece backup provided flawless support, though the two brief codas where Adu left the stage and the players were allowed to show off weren’t quite enough. The sax and guitar players may have gotten more spotlight moments, but as always, Sade’s secret weapon is bassist Paul S. Denman, whose rock-bottom riffs subtly but surely anchor most of these songs, and whose lowest registers tested the Universal woofers and found them not wanting. Opening act Me Phi Me--otherwise known as That Rapper With an Acoustic Guitar--provided some nice moments of hip-hop-pop, but by the time he launched into a reggae version of “Another Brick in the Wall Part II” and started speechifying, ‘60s-style, about the “war” between “those people who are positive and those people who are not positive,” the inadvertent-silliness meter went off the scale.