Most of Natasha Bedingfield’s Friday afternoon at the Austin City Limits Music Festival performance set in the Tito’s Tent came as a surprise to attendees there to hear her mid-2000s hits. Instead of bubbly pop tunes like “Unwritten,” the singer brought an hour mostly consisting of trip-hop and hard rock-infused tracks ill-suited to the festival’s atmosphere.
“Unwritten” definitely did its job, though it may have been suited better to weekend one, where festivalgoers were treated to a milquetoast cover from Stella Lefty. One song, however, is not enough to save an entire show; the rest of her setlist failed to live up to the career-defining smash hit.
For a large part of her performance, Bedingfield seemed to sense her more recent selections were struggling to engage the audience. Though 2008 Billboard Top 10 hit “Pocketful of Sunshine” brought a significant jolt around the 30-minute mark, other attempts to rejuvenate the crowd felt pandering. At various interludes, Bedingfield inserted segments of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” and headliner Charli xcx’s “Girl, So Confusing” before delivering a full cover of The Cranberries’ “Zombies,” failing to capture the vocal urgency of Dolores O’Riordan’s original. Covers and interpolations don’t make a performance derivative, but when they come as crowd pleasers in the midst of flopping originals, they become hard to view as anything else.
Bedingfield’s new material failed chiefly because her abilities as an artist strained to gel with her stylistic rebrand. In the nearly 20 years since her last major hit, Bedingfield’s voice has weathered. Rather than playing to its transformation, her new music demands a level of vocal power and control she no longer possesses. During “Roller Skate,” the lead single from her 2019 album Roll With Me, Bedingfield’s attempt to conjure a vibrato fit for a rock ‘n’ roll leading woman fell short, culminating in an abrasive tone.
In fact, many of her relatively unknown songs fell almost completely flat. The crowd, a sweaty crush flowing out of the Tito’s tent, could hardly muster a head nod for the majority of her set. Bedingfield might have been able to remedy the generally apathetic mood if she established a more enthusiastic rapport with the crowd, but her interjections stayed unoriginal throughout. Before “Dot Dot Dot,” a trite and poorly realized new song loosely about resilience, Bedingfield made a comment about “building the world we want to see” that was so generic, no real meaning could be discerned.
Fans met “Dot Dot Dot” with a more lukewarm response than normal after Bedingfield introduced the song by teasing “Unwritten,” following her uninspiring monologue by saying “let’s release our inhibitions.”
In the end, the crowd got what they came for. Bedingfield even punctuated the set with an EDM remix of her other major hit, “These Words,” giving the performance a sweet aftertaste as the audience cleared out of the tent and walked back into the hot and dusty festival grounds.
