St. Vincent Boston concert review: Band rocks MGM Fenway

It’s hard to imagine a more direct, passionate, and full-throated mission statement about the communal magic of live music than “I want to spend an hour and a half with five thousand people and all dream the same dream.” Which is why it seemed curious coming from St. Vincent.

The singer/songwriter/guitarist/producer/conceptualist doesn’t really do “direct.” She dodges, she swerves, she observes from an icy distance, she twists. But practically everything St. Vincent does is curious, which is how, Thursday at the MGM Music Hall at Fenway, she managed to turn apparent sincerity into as much of a brain tickle as the calculated artifice that preceded it.

St. Vincent performs at MGM Music Hall on Sept 5.Ben Stas for The Boston Globe/The Boston Globe

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with calculated artifice when it’s done at as high a level as St. Vincent. For the opening “Reckless,” she appeared backlit and still, underneath an onstage arch as an electric piano chimed like the tolling of a bell, until her full band came in and the walls came crashing down. She presented with an imperious deliberateness, studiously avoiding the appearance of getting lost in her music. She spent “Dilettante” in a series of louche poses around her set pieces and then drooled a rope of spit through a rictus grin. Even the little hip shimmies she’d throw into her harsh, vogue-like posing during “Big Time Nothing” every now and then were meant to signify humanizing her more than actually doing it.

Her physical and expressive specificity only heightened the power of her quizzical, non-Euclidean songs. “Broken Man” was filled with intrusive noises, from Jason Falkner’s corrosive guitar blats arriving on off-kilter beats to Mark Guiliana’s drums seeming to briefly detach themselves from the rest of the song, while the synth-bass sleaze of “Pay Your Way In Pain” caught St. Vincent tightly gripping something out of her control. And “Cheerleader,” paired gentle and slightly off-putting verses with the pounding slow-motion awakening of the chorus, ending on the slow-motion ricochet of guitars against whirling drums.

St. Vincent at MGM Fenway on Sept. 5. Ben Stas for The Boston Globe/The Boston Globe

But she dropped the mask of performance art in “Year Of The Tiger,” digging into the music of the slippery groaning riff of the chorus before taking tiny tiptoe steps back toward the microphone almost as a corrective. And after effusively introducing her band, she was loose and personable on “New York,” crouching and holding the hand of someone in the front row the whole time. She may have stood stock still with her arms crossed in front of her face as “All Born Screaming” whirled and pulsed, but the music was lush and warm and grand, like aliens welcoming humanity into the galactic community. It had the ironclad, inscrutable logic of a dream, and St. Vincent seemed glad there were others to share it with.

St. Vincent and guitarist Jason Falkner, left, perform at MGM Music Hall on Sept 5.Ben Stas for The Boston Globe/The Boston Globe