In Case You Missed It . . .

Article courtesy of The New York Times

The question wasn’t if Trey Songz would strip down Tuesday night at the Highline Ballroom, but when. From the moment he took the stage — in a grayish tuxedo jacket, black shirt and black pants — the cover image from his third album, “Ready” (Atlantic), loomed over him on an oversize screen. In that stark black-and-white picture he’s shirtless, with six lines of prose tattooed in cursive on the left side of his chest and a six-pack of abdominals just below.

“We want Trey! We want Trey!” chanted the women — there were three of them in high heels for every young man in a collared shirt — in the mainly black crowd. Normally those are good odds for the boys, but Trey Songz transfixes like no other R&B singer of the day: more assured than Chris Brown, more relatable than Usher. By the time he took the stage, plenty of those women had kicked off the punishing heels they were wearing, all the better to pogo up and down for him.

But does being pretty suffice? “Ready” is one of the year’s most promising R&B albums, and a curious one at that. Given the choice between artful indirection and direct talk, Trey Songz will choose the literal every time. The first three songs on “Ready” are called “Panty Droppa,” “Neighbors Know My Name” (from all the screaming, that is) and “I Invented Sex.” The results are bawdy but never lecherous; sometimes all his enthusiastic bedroom talk has an air of childlike goofiness to it, as if he were thrilled to get away with boasting so freely.

On Tuesday, during a convincing but almost too-smooth performance, Trey Songz sang material from “Ready” almost exclusively. “LOL :-),” an ode to the erotic potential of mobile communication technology, was loopy and lighthearted. “Successful,” his duet with his friend the rising rapper Drake had more bite than the recorded version.

Other songs were notable by their absence. He skipped the sinuous 2007 “Can’t Help but Wait,” his biggest hit and by far his finest song. And there was no “D.O.A. Kellz,” his reimagining of Jay-Z’s “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)” as an assault on R. Kelly’s streetwise-R&B crown. (Instead there was “Say Aah,” the most Kellyesque song from the new album. It sounds like a job application.)

That act of attempted patricide reflected Trey Songz’s growing stature, but also his hubris. He’s dapper, charming and utterly confident: almost enough to balance out a voice that’s limber but not particularly deep. Onstage he behaved like someone trying on stardom and hoping everyone thinks it fits, never once letting down his guard.

When he finally did peel off his shirt, just before his last song — the Prince-like “Yo Side of the Bed” — it was less titillation than self-fulfilling prophecy, not that it mattered to those vibrating madly in the audience.

“If I give this to you, baby,” he said, addressing no one in particular, “you’ve got to sleep with me every night.” Then he surveyed the crowd, looked several women in the eye and tossed the shirt casually into the scrum. The ensuing warfare, at least, was beyond question.