Amid the rain, Warped Tour overflows with disparate acts
MANSFIELD - For a half hour, it poured buckets at Wednesday's sold-out
Those were probably the only experiences shared by everybody. The inflatable monolith on the midway listed the schedules for six different stages, while the printout posted at the guest services center covered nine. There were at least three others not listed on either, making it easy to miss a modest gem like the soul- and Motown-influenced punk of Saint Alvia Cartel.
Luckily, it wasn't hard to catch something worthwhile. Against Me! mixed a disco-pop sensibility with a punk approach and an improbable vein of heartland rock. The Aggrolites were one of the tour's ska contingent, clad entirely in red and laying down a sharp groove on the Beatles's "Don't Let Me Down." The geek contingent was ably represented by power-dance band Cobra Starship, whose frontman, Gabe Saporta, came across like an '80s-disco version of British Invasion nerd Freddie Garrity. And punk Rottweilers Street Dogs unsurprisingly gathered the hometown crowd's allegiance with ease.
With the overwhelming number of acts, some letdowns were also inevitable. Shwayze's two-MC party hip-hop couldn't quite make up its mind whether it was an ironic joke or not. Relient K played by-the-numbers emo-pop, while Say Anything was intense but hollow.
Less inevitable was Warped's continuing shortage of women onstage, made all the more glaring by their more than adequate representation in the crowd. There were so few female performers, in fact, that they had to double up, with Cobra Starship keytarist Victoria Asher dancing with affable dork-rappers 3OH!3.
Aching to be an American Lily Allen but lacking the attitude to pull it off, Katy Perry sounded like nobody so much as Miley Cyrus, with her slick guitar pulse and vague "You go, girl!" lyrics that resonated with the teenage girls in the crowd. Fake coyness notwithstanding, she betrayed her own lack of nerve when her band introduced her by pounding out the riff to Heart's "Barracuda" and she didn't even try to sing the song.
Perry was seemingly at Warped purely as a credibility-building exercise, but the spirit of the tour was captured by rapper Othello. On a "stage" that was nothing more than a sheet of linoleum in front of a tent, he performed on equal footing with his audience. Aided by high-energy, snap-funky beats, he broke down more boundaries between artist and fan than a thousand Perry autograph lines. Then, as DJ Manwell's scratch break started, he invited everyone into the tent to watch.
