My Brightest Diamond with Tim Fite, Wexner Center, 11-13

It will probably take awhile for Shara Worden, singer/songwriter for My Brightest Diamond, to live down the fact that she toured with Sufjan Stevens as one of his Illinoisemakers. Stevens has become too big of a name not to mention it, and the tour is how Worden began to make a name for herself. But judging from the show at the Wexner Center Tuesday night, Worden can fill a stage on her own just fine.

With a voice like hers, touring as merely a background singer for other bands would be a colossal waste of her talent, which was meant to be showcased in the Wex’s minimalist performance space in the context of a three-piece band, as opposed to Stevens’s traveling orchestra. Worden played her semi-hollow-body guitar gingerly at times and aggressively at others while her excellent drummer held down the vacillating beats and the bassist established the groove. But the tastefully simple instrumentation was merely window dressing for what everyone came to hear--Worden’s voice. It was pitch-perfect, veering from rock to jazz to soul to opera, ethereal at times and raucous at others.

Worden has studied opera, and it shows. Yet, she’s also a Nina Simone fan, and that shows, too. The versatility of her singing allows her to pull off all sorts of vocal theatrics, from trembles to yelps to whispers, often within the same song. It was apparent by the covers she played, as well: “It’s Over” by Roy Orbison, “Feeling Good” by Nina Simone and “Tainted Love,” made famous by Soft Cell. They all sounded as good, if not better, than the My Brightest Diamond originals, which drew from the 2006 debut, Bring Me the Workhorse.

For some reason, Tim Fite is touring with My Brightest Diamond. His music can best be described as folk-rap, but the style changes drastically from song to song. It’s not even close to the same genre as My Brightest Diamond, and the pairing felt forced. Still, Fite’s an entertainer with a boisterous sense of humor who played in front of a video screen that mostly showed himself playing guitar and singing along to the songs. Fite looks like a younger Paul Giamatti, and decked out in seersucker pants with suspenders, he displays endless energy. The more rap-leaning tunes worked the best with all the pre-recorded loops, and “It’s All Right Here,” a rant against consumerism, was the true highlight of the set. The humor outside of the songs, such as a story about a rat named Juice who had an orange-scented hiney, didn’t work as well, and Fite’s sidekick didn’t help; he felt the need to explain jokes and chatter nonstop.

More photos on the Flickr page. (Not the best shots this time around, unfortunately.)