 RHCP make old school rock for new school fans | |
Great news for Peppers fans!
Original fans of the Red Hot Chili Peppers must have stayed home on Wednesday night. Instead they sent their nieces, nephews and offspring to check out that scrappy '80s band from California that used to cater to skate punks, surfer dudes and funk junkies.
The Chili Peppers, for their part, seemed unfazed by the near-complete turnover in their base.
The band that sold out BankAtlantic Center on Wednesday is not a radically different animal from the group that formed in 1983. But it is something of a revision.
The Chili Peppers in 2007 are basically making new rock for now kids, using the same basic ingredients they employed when they were young punks with soul.
The difference between then and now, as demonstrated on Wednesday, is the enlarged contours of the music. Not for nothing is the band's latest release – two CDs of new music -- called Stadium Arcadium. Newer songs including Dani California and Snow (Hey Oh) traded heavily, and effectively, in the properties of arena rock.
The band used less reverb than U2, but put enough space between the instruments to let the notes float upward and outward, and let the refrains achieve that sonic wraparound effect.
For more than two hours, the Chili Peppers alternated between melancholic power balladry and wind-sprint funk, sometimes in the space of one song. But even the signature scratchy, chaotic were tweaked and articulated just enough for arena consumption. And there was a sense of the Chili Peppers playing the wise uncle with advice: Throw Away Your Television wasn't quite the Network mad-as-hell moment it wanted to be, but as a pure rock jam it was awe-inspiring.
Gnarls Barkley, the tag team of singer-rapper Cee-Lo and DJ-keyboardist Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton, opened in the company of nine other musicians. A string section, backing vocalists and assorted other instruments were used to bring the duo's retro-soul debut album, St. Elsewhere, to life.
Sometimes the arranging suffocated the music. But on the budoir funk Crazy and a cover of the Violent Femmes' Gone Daddy Gone, Gnarls Barkley was a clean slam dunk. | 
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