50,000 at Stadium Get a Listless Cure

We don’t know about you all, but when we’re in a lonely, reflective kind of mood--perhaps contemplating our own mortality and alienation and spiritual exhaustion--and want to explore that ennui through getting lost in some truly introspective, soul-searching mood music, we like to look through the local listings and see who’s playing over at, oh, Dodger Stadium.

Friday evening, before a crowd of nearly 50,000, it was current kings of pain the Cure, along with special guests Love and Rockets, the Pixies and Shelleyan Orphan--four fairly distinctive groups whose most common shared traits are minor-key modalities and a deliberate lack of stage presence. “Stadium rock” it wasn’t.

Listless, it often was. The Cure’s 2 1/2-hour capping set contained an hour’s worth of truly riveting music, with the rest devoted to some of their most languorous material, slow songs about the slow slide toward death in which the same four bars drone on and on and on. The almost equally popular Love and Rockets demonstrated equal proclivity for inflicting its least-tuneful music (like the low-geared “Motorcycle”) upon a mass audience through a sound system that rendered the already distorted wall of sound even more sludge-like.

The Cure’s current “Disintegration” album is at once both fascinating and aggravating look at a special band struggling to hone and perfect its style. What variety there was in prior releases has been thrown out in favor of homogenization. Most of the songs have no peaks or valleys. All this, singer-guitarist Robert Smith indicates, is to strip away the extraneous trappings of pop structure and immerse a listener in an emotion at great, steady length.

But what can be an interesting aesthetic adventure at home, late at night with the headphones on, is not so much fun at a baseball stadium with terrible sound and tens of thousands of students chattering about their high-school workdays and party animals in the upper decks lobbing full cups of soda at the unfortunate below. (The lengthy food fight was really something to see; reams of black-clad kids breaking down their dread-of-life pretensions and re-enacting “Animal House.”)

About two-thirds of the way through its performance, the Cure broke into a string of its best, shortest, poppiest numbers (mostly from older albums), climaxed by the funky “Why Can’t I Be You,” one of the most delightful near-hits of recent years. Then came the encores and a return to torpor, and the event once again became a giant teen mixer instead of a concert.

Much derision has been directed the way of the Who and the Rolling Stones for their tours of the nation’s stadiums this summer, but there’s something even more cynical about the Cure playing in such a setting--without even video screens as a concession for the extra teeming tens of thousands.

True, three-story-high close-ups of Smith’s face would do the music a disservice by placing the emphasis on the singer, not the song, which--despite the armies of young men and women who rat their hair to resemble Smith’s unique look--is not what the Cure is about. But with nothing visual to focus on except enough continual dry ice to choke Nanook of the North, and faced with music largely free of transitions or climaxes, it was the occasional surprise lighting effect that got the biggest cheers from the crowd.