Concert review: Carrie Underwood embraces her inner Axl Rose at wild Target Center show

Carrie Underwood rocked Target Center on Tuesday night.

If that sounds like a trite observation, well, usually I’d agree with you. While the 39-year-old “American Idol” champ has always leaned heavily into pop and rock for her energetic, big-production shows, Underwood truly embraced her inner rock star Tuesday.

That’s not just because she offered an enthusiastic take on Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” near the end of the show. (In April, she invited Axl Rose to join her onstage at the Stagecoach festival for a pair of GNR classics and called it “the greatest night of my life.”) She injected rock energy at every turn, starting with Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades,” which blasted over the loudspeakers before she began her set.

She opened with a supercharged “Good Girl” followed by a rafters-rattling “Church Bells” and a massive “Undo It,” which ended with an audience singalong. And from there, she kept the pace brisk — yet still worked in multiple outfit changes — and the songs booming, whether they were her many chart toppers or lesser-known tracks from her ninth album “Denim and Rhinestones,” which she released back in June.

Before “She Don’t Know,” she emerged from a trap door in the stage clutching a glass of red wine and telling the crowd “in case you didn’t know, you are at a country music concert … we are so country up here, we’ve got two fiddlers.” During “Blown Away,” her strong, pure vocals cut through a whole lot of stage production. (Prior to her current tour, she played an extended residency in Las Vegas and clearly picked up a few new tips for razzle and dazzle in the process.)

“Cry Pretty” felt like an overblown GNR power ballad that wrapped with pyro. Underwood followed that by riding a trapeze swing that drifted over the heads of the general admission crowd on the floor and landed at a satellite stage on the other side of the arena. She strapped on a guitar and ran through “Two Black Cadillacs,” “Garden” and one of her signature songs, “Jesus, Take the Wheel.”

In order to get back to the main stage, Underwood climbed into a floating gyroscope-style metal globe with pink and blue neon wings and crooned “Crazy Angels.” Then she invited her opening act Jimmie Allen to join her for the title track of her new album, a relatively rare (for her, anyway) midtempo jam.

If all of that wasn’t enough, during “Poor Everybody Else,” she parked herself behind a drum kit and banged away. Never stop rocking, Carrie.

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