Music review: Post Malone, Hydro, Glasgow

I find it quite pleasing that Post Malone, one of the world’s biggest pop stars, looks like a moonlighting member of a biker gang who’s come to fix the boiler. Take that, convention.

Post Malone, Hydro, Glasgow ***

The latest leg of his globe-trotting solo tour – he literally performs alone on stage, lest anything should detract from his pain-wracked introspection – marked his first visit to Scotland. His teeming crowd of ecstatic millennial fans received him like a wounded God. Not bad for an arena show that basically amounted to a heavily- tattooed teddy bear lurching up and down a gangway.

Every generation needs a poster boy for rampant disaffection, and Malone, alias native New Yorker Austin Post, is only too happy to wallow in his seemingly bottomless cauldron of misery for these kids. They clearly adore this unassuming lunk, this none-more-intense cloud R&B everyman who wears his aching heart on his sundial-patterned sleeve.

Malone fuses bowel-quaking blitzkrieg beats with gloomy minor-key confessionals: commercial modern pop with a heavy dose of emo angst. Typical song titles include I Fall Apart, Paranoid and Broken Whisky Glass (which opened the show in characteristically melodramatic style). He reached peak Malone during a raw-throated rendition of Blame It On Me, an almost heroically unapologetic explosion of towering self-pity that pretty much sums up his musical MO.

He’s alright, Post Malone. He’s pretty good. He does what’s required of him with minimum fuss and maximum professionalism, a thoroughly reliable tradesman.

PAUL WHITELAW