Matt Goss has aged into more authentic vintage vibe

Some choose croonerdom, and others have croonerdom thrust upon them.

Matt Goss' career was basically the opposite of Harry Connick Jr.'s and Michael Buble's. Those guys came out of the gate doing Sinatra standards that played as novelties for soccer moms until they got big enough to express their own identities.

Goss, on the other hand, was a young pop idol in his native England, sharing the spotlight with his brother Luke in the '80s pop band Bros. But in his 40s, he reinvented himself as a retro cat and landed in the wondrously swanky Cleopatra's Barge at Caesars Palace, the only vestige of the original hotel to escape 'blah'-ification and still stand in its 1966 glory.

Five years on, Goss is a fixture on the boat, recently stepping up from weekends to four nights a week. His act plays almost like environmental theater, as close a match of a sound to its setting as vintage enthusiasts are going to find in this town.

Dim and high-contrast strip-joint lighting pinpoints Goss on the small stage in his bow tie and, a few songs later, a derby. He works the room with droll charm as a three-piece horn section struts through '60-cool charts on originals — the opening "All About the Hang" and "Lovely Las Vegas" — plus a few requisite standards, such as "Feeling Good" and "Luck Be A Lady."

All of it is pleasantly sung; "crooner" turns out to be a descriptive word for the way a gentle voice plays against the punchy horns. And it all seems more authentic than in the early going, when Goss came off like he was trying too hard. Thankfully, he got rid of video clips of James Bond and Frank Sinatra that hit us like elbows in the rib cage: "See? This guy's cool like these guys. Get it?"

Four eye-candy female dancers still drop in from time to time, but the chorography is looser and less posed, more like they're just having fun.

Musically, he's loosened up even more. Songs that run traditional lengths in their recorded versions are stretched into excursions that could run stopwatch races with Prince or Funkadelic. "The Day We Met" starts off as a bland adult-contemporary ballad, works its way into a Boz Scaggs uptown groove and then veers again, into reggae.

The jams give Goss time to pull up women from the audience to dance or to pour himself a drink from a customer's bottle. "It's free and I stole it," he quips.

In spite of it all, I sense inner conflict between Goss the "singer-songwriter" and Goss as "showman."

Quickly, for those too young to remember the Las Vegas he is trying to rekindle: The old days drew a line between "singers" and "entertainers." You had to have an "act" to play Vegas, and it didn't hurt if you were were larger than life. An extreme personality. A character.

Goss' vibe is more sincere. He is soft-spoken to the point of mumbling. At one point he notes "You can hear everything from the (adjacent) bar (without buying a ticket)." If that's true it's a real deal, because you can't hear everything he says inside.

He can give originals such as "Movies in Your Mind" a retro arrangement, but the scene-setting narratives to introduce them make you wonder if Goss wouldn't rather be talking to us from the stage of a proper theater, surrounded by candles and wine bottles, rather than a gin-soaked Vegas lounge.

If so, tough. There are plenty of sincere singer-songwriters out there, but not nearly enough retro-Vegas crooners.

Read more from Mike Weatherford at bestoflasvegas.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com.