Review: Billie Eilish balances sizzle with sensitive on new tour

BALTIMORE – Like any good pop star, Billie Eilish knows what to do when a bra is thrown at her onstage: Strut around with it dangling from your finger, of course.
She was bounding through the second song of her set, the slithery “Lunch,” when a few undergarments rained onto the stage. It was but one acknowledgment of affection from the disciples in a sold-out crowd that actively bounced, fist-pumped and mimicked Eilish’s hand gestures for 90 unrelenting minutes.
The multiple-Grammy-and-Oscar winner, 22, unveiled her spectacular in-the-round production at Baltimore’s CFG Bank Arena Friday, the first U.S. date of her Hit Me Hard and Soft tour. Eilish will play arenas around the country through December, performing multiple nights in several cities, before heading to Australia and Europe in 2025.  
The football field-sized stage of this new tour is her multimedia playground, a slick behemoth featuring a lighted cube with a floating platform for Eilish to perch atop, speakers that dip from their suspensions, scooped-out sections for the band and busy video screens blasting to every side of the venue.
In her mismatched tube socks, backward baseball cap and dark jersey bearing No. 72, Eilish looked like the Sportiest Spice of her generation. But the biker shorts and fishnets capping her casual-cool look truly exemplified the Eilish touch.
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There is no artifice to her. No questioning her level of sincerity when she tells fans at the end of the show, “I will always cherish you … I will always fight for you.” No doubting her level of commitment as she builds into the roar of “The Greatest.” No probing the reason behind her wrinkled nose smile after romping through the pyro-spewing “NDA.”
Eilish lays out who she is and that vulnerability is rewarded with a fan base that heeds her command for a minute of silence so she can loop her vocals for a beautifully layered “Wildflower” and spring into the air during the blooping keyboard riff of “Bad Guy.”
For this tour behind her third album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” Eilish, whose taut band was minus brother Finneas, off doing promotion for his new solo album, pulls equally from her trio of studio releases. She lures fans into her goth club for “Happier Than Ever’s” “Oxytocin” and swaggers through “Therefore I Am.”
Her 2019 debut album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?,” is represented with a blitz of lasers and the murky vibe of “Bury a Friend” and a piano-based “Everything I Wanted,” which found Eilish loping around the inside of the stage gates to brush hands with fans.
And her current release, which flaunts the soulful strut that roils into a pop banger- aka “L’Amour De Ma Vie – as well as the most sumptuous song in Eilish’s catalog, the show-closing “Birds of a Feather,” received numerous spotlight moments.
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Eilish adeptly balances the Nine Inch Nails-inspired industrial beats of “Chihiro” with the swoony “Ocean Eyes,” her voice ping-ponging from under the swarm of sounds from her club hits to the honeyed tone of her ballads.
As the brisk show tapered to its finale, Eilish sat at one end of the stage, the arena glowing in Barbie-pink lights, and spilled out the first whispery words of “What Was I Made For?” She hasn’t disregarded the depth of the song, despite its ubiquity, and this live version infuses the weeper with the pulse of a drumbeat, turning the award-winning song into a soaring arena power ballad.
Onstage, Eilish stays true to the title of her current album, hitting fans hard and soft in all of the right places.