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A sellout crowd of 900 was shoe-horned into the Student Union Ballroom at the University of Massachusetts Wednesday night for a double shot of New Wave rock 'n' roll — with an adrenaline chaser.
The show — a twin bill featuring Britain's Elvis Costello and Boston's Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band — represented something of a coup for the UMass Union program council, as both acts are currently in the vanguard of the burgeoning New Wave musical/political movement.
Both acts — particularly Costello — lived up to their advance billing with a short, furiously paced performances. In fact Costello's show was so short — 40 minutes — that most of the crowd left complaining about the miserly portion of music they had received.
No rock 'n' roller since Bruce Springsteen has been more highly touted than Costello. His first record was released last year to gushing critical praise, and more than a trickle of commercial response as well.
Unlike Springsteen however, Costello is not a physically dynamic performer in concert. In fact, given the various insecurities unflinchingly revealed in his autobiographical lyrics, it is surprising he even appears in public, much less on a stage.
In his performance Wednesday night however, he achieved a sort of clumsy potency by pouring out his bitterly honest songs with a bleeding urgency. The early part of his set was particularly impressive as it contained two of the best songs from his album: "Mystery Dance" and "Less Than Zero." Both were crisp, upbeat songs, with the latter — a caustic retort to Britain's neo Nazi Party — making particularly effective use of full stops.
Half of Costello's 12-song set consisted of new, unrecorded songs, among the best of which was "I Don't Want to Go to Chelsea." "Radio, Radio," another new song with an exhilarating chorus, denounced A.M. radio, but sounded infectious enough to become a hit on it.
Unfortunately Costello's set came to an abrupt ending — he stormed off stage, convinced the sound system was malfunctioning — and he never had a chance to give the sort of performance most of the enthusiastically cheering crowd seemed to think he was capable of.
Equally short, but for a different reason, was the opening act by Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band. The group's 10 song, 50-minute set featured a thick, pounding rhythm section that was deftly punctuated by guitarist Billy Loosigian's solos. The overall effect of the deliberately overbearing instrumentation was an eerie, ominous wall of sound, that could have been a soundtrack to a rock 'n' roll horror show.
Alexander leavened this sound with his oddly likeable quavering — he doesn't really sing in any technical sense — and his unintentionally comic stage presence. When he wasn't prancing, or skittering, or crawling across the stage, he was pawing his "Boom Boom" emblazoned piano with amateurish amusement.
Most of the crowd, however, was not amused, and Alexander and band left the stage after his last song to some very little applause and to a chorus of audience booing.
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