BØRNS: High marks in old school, new school, charm school

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BØRNS at the El Rey Theatre (Photo by Chad Elder)
BØRNS at the El Rey Theatre (Photo by Chad Elder)

BØRNS proved the perfect antidote to garishly overblown mainstream pop music on Monday night at the El Rey Theatre.

It’s not that the L.A.-based singer-songwriter — born Garrett Borns — is consciously retro, nor are the songs on his debut album “Dopamine” groundbreakingly modern. It’s that the native Michigander has found an equilibrium between the old and new schools, with songs that shift subtly between pop eras and stand up without any cult of personality.

||| Photos by Chad Elder

The sold-out show was bookended by nods to the old school — BØRNS and his bandmates entered to the P.A. blaring the 1967 Cowsills hit “The Rain, the Park and Other Things,” and right after the “I love the flower girl” chorus, the song dissolved into a bed of electronics, leading into the headliners’ set. After the hour-long show, the crowd would exit to Frank Sinatra’s “Young at Heart.”

In between, the quintet won over the young hearts (and a surprising number of older ones) in that crowd. The synth-heavy “Dug My Heart” kicked off the show before BØRNS inspired a massive sing-along to “10,000 Emerald Pools,” the first song he wrote after relocating to Los Angeles. Notably, the 23-year-old frontman displayed some beyond-his-years tricks, varying the vocal melody lines ever so much from the recorded version. The electro banger “Past Lives” followed before the frontman — possessed, as he is, with a Buckley-esque falsetto, a Cheshire grin and enviable hair — laid some Midwestern charm on the audience.

“I am BØRNS, we are BØRNS, you are BØRNS,” he told them, without a drop of the haughtiness you might intuit from reading that in quotation marks. “We came here together.”

The disco-pop nugget “Holy Ghost” followed, eliciting squeals when he sang “I’m thirsty for your ecstasy,” and those squeals turned to flat-out screams for the high notes (and there are plenty) in “The Emotion.” BØRNS’ old-school Teen Idol skills shone on “Clouds,” and he dedicated “American Money” to “all the singles out there … You know, the one-dollar bills.”

After the glammy rave-up “Electric Love” closed the main set, BØRNS returned for an encore that included a cover of Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets.”

L.A. quartet Avid Dancer opened the night with 40 minutes of sublime guitar pop from their debut album “1st Bath,” the new single “I Feel It” and a cover the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s “Anemone.”