Although much of the audience for Bo Burnhams Words Words Words could have been mistaken for extras from the house party scene in Superbad (many wearing shorts, and one a non-ironic flat cap), Burnhams appeal stretches far further than might be expected of a nineteen-year-old best known for a song about YouTube. Burnham is staggeringly self-assured and ferociously erudite. Allusions to Salvador Dalí, Socrates, Harper Lee and John Steinbeck (The Rapes of Grath) sit next to jokes about Disney and Hannah Montana, but he is perhaps at his most virtuosic as a poet. He demonstrates a prodigious sense of cadence and rhythm in his haikus and in a quite superb dirty parody of a Shakespearean sonnet, but even more impressively in his songs lyrics. The two raps, I Hate Catchy Choruses (And Im A Hypocrite) and another about the tensions between Catholicism and garage music, boast dizzying, almost Joycean gifts for wordplay and literary allusion.Some of his other songs, however, arent quite as good. Though the lyrics are always rich and lively, the more traditional songs on the piano are melodically repetitive (and not nearly as sophisticated as, say, those of Tim Minchin) and Burnhams singing voice, though crisp in its delivery, has a brash, Whitlams-esque timbre that starts to grate after a while. During non-musical interludes, Burnhams comic persona has an aloof, clipped quality that, no matter how clever or unexpected the punch lines invariably are, is almost too self-possessed for its own good. There was an innocuous incident where Burnham made a horribly sarcastic reproach to an audience member (who, in Bos defence, had interjected by answering a rhetorical question). It went down extremely well with the crowd, but it typified the aura of hermetic genius Burnham seems keen to cultivate. Perhaps Im going a bit far. He riffs well, tongue firmly in cheek, on his humanist role as an artist, so I doubt he takes himself too seriously. But the set has the cold, pedantic brilliance of a Stanley Kubrick film, and similarly little in the way of charm or warmth. Curiously, the sincerest song, I Am An Artist, is his weakest, so perhaps he is better off eschewing the cuddly vulnerability of Flight of the Conchords et al. I Am An Artist ends with the line Im just a kid, and (Im desperate not to sound patronising) it is very easy to forget this. Burnham is an extraordinary talent, but a smile here and a wink to the audience there might dispel the less palatable air of precocious conceit.
