B-52s still know how to party
Has it really been 30 years since the B-52s erupted out of Athens, Ga., in a Day-Glo explosion of beehive hairdos, rock lobsters, and planets named Claire, as the giddiest beach party that Frankie and Annette never got invited to? High camp and trash culture - both celebrated stocks-in-trade of this gleefully outlandish combo - may be disposable, but Wednesday night before a sold-out, rapturous room at the Paradise, the B-52s proved they are anything but.
On this, the first date of the band's tour in support of "Funplex," its first album in 16 years, the quartet (augmented by a bassist, drummer, and keyboard player who also added occasional second guitar), was ridiculously on its game, from the new party favor of "Pump," which opened the show, to the silly, immortal "Rock Lobster," which closed it 90 minutes later.
There was frontman-cum-emcee Fred Schneider, wearing his sunglasses at night, zestfully barking out an oath to kiss the crowd's "Boston cream pie" on "Strobelight" and delivering more cowbell on "Love Shack." Schneider, at one point brandishing a riding crop, looked and sounded like a high school guidance counselor with a technicolor double life: that, namely, being the nutty nougat at the center of the pure confection that was Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson.
With bright, bubblegum-flavored voices that, after all this time, are still the aural equivalent of a sugar addict's dream or a diabetic's nightmare, Pierson and Wilson flooded the room with the blinding harmonies of bizarro classics like "Private Idaho." Meanwhile, guitarist Keith Strickland provided the band's linchpin sound: a robustly heady but streamlined concoction that fused tangy Dick Dale surf guitar, Link Wray rumble, and a dark dash of Steve Cropper cool.
The new songs (the bombers liberally spiked their punch - er, set - with seven of the new album's 11 tracks) jumped alongside the old ones with cheeky verve. The disc's title track was a go-go-boot beauty that simultaneously seemed to ridicule, and revel in, mall culture consumerism; "Hot Corner," an old-fashioned rump shaker, drew a deep dance floor groove. Slowing things down amid the raucous ruckus was the more melodically inclined "Juliet of the Spirits," a touchingly tender highlight. That song and just about everything else, sparkled with the good cheer, inclusive communal spirit, and uniquely idiosyncratic charm, of the B-52s themselves.
Fortunately, the evening's openers, Eagle Seagull, proved far better than their inauspicious choice of a band name. The Nebraska-based six-piece electro-pop outfit, which at times featured two - count 'em, two! -synth players and a violinist, performed a pungent half-hour set of angular dance-floor rock that recalled the Cure and the Rapture. In other words, the Bravery, but with better songs.
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