MINNEAPOLIS — It was already as clear and bare as the chest he showed off all night.

Nonetheless, toward the end of his high-energy concert Sunday night at Target Center, Sombr wanted to spell it out even more overtly just how much his music means to his audiences. So he played a pre-taped video that showed fans talking about how much his music means to them. Some of the people in the clips were weepy. Others were giddy.

That worshipful video — it felt like the concert version of a political TV commercial — underlined two broader traits in the New York pop wunderkind’s first Twin Cities arena concert: Sombr himself was mostly either sad or elated in his emotionally simplistic songs; also, the young newcomer is too obvious, overzealous and hamfisted in his pop-starry ways. He lays on his showmanship as thick as the black eyeliner that miraculously stayed caked to his face throughout Sunday’s sweaty (and weepy) 100-minute concert.

Deserving all kinds of benefit of the doubt and kudos being such a big name at a mere 21, the singer, born Shane Boose, repeatedly boasted of the well-attended arena concert being his first time in Minneapolis. However, he had performed eight miles away at the Palace Theatre in St. Paul just last year. He also dropped a “Hello Cleveland!”-style blunder when he mistakenly called his host state Mississippi. But at least he didn’t say Wisconsin.

Sunday’s crowd of about 13,000 fans skewed even younger than Sombr himself, with grade-school girls and boys intermingling with the predictably dominant teenage-girl fanbase, plus parents who seemed pleased to at least not be stuck attending an MGK show.

And yes, the young fans sang their hearts out and cheered loudly every time Sombr spoke to them about his dreams coming true or the insecurities he had to overcome. He kept doubling up on his between-song speeches by flashing mantra-like lines across the video screens, including, “This night is temporary / This feeling will last,” and “Us meeting here wasn’t an accident.”

It’s amazing Sombr himself didn’t suffer an accident. Throughout the concert, he jumped around, kicked his legs, backspun and made excited rah-rah gestures like he was leading a cheerleader camp. He gets an “A” for energy and earnestness.

His vocal performance, however, sounded more like something out of theater camp. Songs like “Perfume” and “Homewrecker” had a pipsqueak-y sound to them in concert, the pitchy, pubescent tones made even worse by squeaky-clean sex-you-up lyrics like, “I still keep your sweater in my dresser in case I’m craving your scent,” and, “With you, there always can be I.”

Sombr’s high falsetto parts especially came off as flat and thin as his always-on-display chest in such songs as “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind” and “Makes Me Want You.” Perhaps his voice was simply succumbing to the wear-and-tear from a bustling year of touring.

The performance he gave into the cameras was stronger — and maybe more important, too. He seemed to always know where the camera operators were, and he played to them constantly with winks, wiggles, dramatic gestures and deep glances.

During the sad power ballad “Canal Street,” Sombr even crouched over on his knees as if writhing in pain and had the camera operator come up behind him and film him like... well, like he was going in for a colonoscopy.

Starting with the opening song, “We Never Dated,” the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts graduate performed in front of a big stage backdrop that looked like a New York streetscape with fire escapes, apartment windows and smokestacks and whatnot. He also told the crowd at the start of the show he was transporting them to New York for the show.

Other than that backdrop and the way he performed more like a Broadway star than a rock star, though, there really wasn’t anything else New York-y about the concert.

All the imagery, maneuvering and showmanship came together at the show’s end, though, for which Sombr saved the two best songs in his still-small canon: “Back to Friends” and “12 to 12,” both impressively bouncy, catchy and heart-achy (and light on falsetto, too).

The latter song came off so well, Sombr performed it twice. To change it up, though, he asked fans to put down their cell phones and enjoy “12 to 12″ camera-free the second time through. He presumably couldn’t ask them to do it the first time around because he knows how much their cell video of the song would mean to them.

Sunday’s second of two opening acts, the Last Dinner Party, was by itself worth the price of admission for Sombr’s cheapest seats (just $31). Singer Abigail Morris came off like a cross between Siouxsie Sioux and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O as she coolly danced and bellowed in the artful rockers “The Feminine Urge” and “Like Nothing Matters.” She shattered the Rated-PG cleanliness of Sombr’s music along the way, but at least she did so in a British accent that made the F-bombs sound polite.

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