POP MUSIC REVIEW : Lightweight Bangles Don’t Dazzle--or Disappoint

If you adjust your expectations properly, you won’t be disappointed by a Bangles concert.

Properly means: Don’t expect music that’s too complex or challenging, don’t expect much virtuosity (or that the four women will even be playing their instruments), don’t expect the best songs to be Bangles compositions and don’t expect the set to be very long.

You can expect a no-frills blast of enormously engaging and buoyant pop-rock, four solid lead singers and plenty of lovely four-part harmonies and, overall, a dose of lightweight, escapist entertainment ideally suited for a late-summer evening or for kicking off a holiday weekend.

Consistent with a night so grounded in expectation, the Bangles’ concert Thursday at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa offered few surprises. The quartet still opens with a rockin’ reworking of Paul Simon’s “Hazy Shade of Winter” and closes with Liam Sternberg’s superbly silly “Walk Like an Egyptian”--just like it did in its shows last April.

Most bands would change their sets over the months; you don’t necessarily expect the Bangles to. And there’s even something oddly comforting about that kind of familiarity. It’s like watching a “Mr. Ed” rerun: You know how it’s going to come out, but you still get a goofy kick out of it.

Even though the songs remained the same, there was some verbal business that made Thursday’s show a little different. For starters, before launching into Jules Shear’s “If She Knew What She Wants” (another good song not written by the group), singer-guitarist Susanna Hoffs recounted the history of the band, explaining how it formed in her parents’ garage one night in 1981.

(It seemed, though, as if Hoffs was rewriting that history a bit. Original bassist Annette Zilinskas would have been surprised to learn that the four women “you see up here” were in the garage that night eight years ago. Similarly, the earliest fans of the group (from back when it was called the Bangs) might have been surprised to learn that on that same night, the women “became the Bangles.”)

Another verbal wrinkle was bassist Michael Steele’s reminder that she was on home turf: “I grew up around Balboa Island,” said Steele, the sassiest Bangle, before announcing she was “president of the Rob Lowe Freedom Fund” and dedicating “Complicated Girl” to him.

Otherwise, it was pretty much Bangles business as usual, with the foursome (augmented by a keyboardist) in fine form. Are they really as good as they sounded, though? Any time two songs are performed with taped accompaniment (in this case “Eternal Flame” and “Walk Like an Egyptian”), it raises a troubling question: Is the rest of the show live, or is it Memorex?

This issue was probably moot to the audience, especially toward the end, when it was whipped into a sock-hop frenzy by a rip-roaring rock block of “In Your Room,” “Hero Takes a Fall,” “Walking Down Your Street” and the truly grand finale of “Walk Like an Egyptian,” when the band invited some members of the crowd on stage to do just that.

The show was over after a scant 75 minutes, and that’s pretty much what we expected, too.

On the other hand, the performance by the opening act, the Untouchables, wasn’t what we expected, at least initially. Orange County traditionally has been a major stronghold for this ska/reggae/soul/R&B; outfit; folks generally flock to local U.T. shows and immediately go bonkers to the group’s frenetic dance music pop-pourri. But neither the band nor the audience seemed to get down to business Tuesday until the final moments.

There are a few possible explanations: At the outset, the crowd was quite small (hundreds more filed in during the UTs’ set) and unusually sedate--maybe because it was still light out, but maybe because most of the first few songs were only so-so. In any case, departed singer Chuck Askerneese--the pint-size, remarkably animated front man who used to dart around the stage nonstop--was sorely missed.

Toward the end, though, when it was dark and the audience was much larger and finally afflicted with dance fever, the band kicked into overdrive with what continue to be three of its best tunes: “Wild Child,” “Free Yourself” and its eminently peppy version of “(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone.” That was more like it, for all concerned.