Pop Music Reviews : Beefcake Buffoonery From Full Force in Anaheim

Full Force, a band of three brothers and three cousins from Brooklyn, has made its mark as a production and songwriting team for such rap and funk acts as U.T.F.O., Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam and James Brown.

But Full Force also is a recording group and stage band, and in an uneven but enjoyably unself-conscious show Sunday at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim, the group had no inclination to cultivate a producer-like sense of cool mystique. Instead, this band of hefty body-builders went in for beefcake buffoonery in a loose show that was played strictly for laughs before a sparse but actively engaged audience.

Frontmen Paul Anthony and Bowlegged Lou devoted a good deal of their energy to Casanova moves and macho sexcapades, but the action was too wacky--perhaps unintentionally so--to be offensive. There was a certain purity to Full Force’s hamming. The concert seemed less like a polished performance calculated to advance a career and push a product than the sort of thing Full Force would have kept doing if it never had made it out of the New York dance clubs.

The early going of the 70-minute set foundered with aimless medleys drawn from the band’s three albums. The show peaked with spirited funk on “Static” and “I’m Real,” two songs from the group’s James Brown collaboration.

Full Force (which was also scheduled to headline the Roxy on Monday) finished by staging an old-fashioned dance contest. From “Saturday Night Fever” to Sunday night funk with Full Force, dance contests evidently have become the Brooklyn borough pastime since the departure of the Dodgers. The competition was a rambling, chaotic affair, but far too funny and strange to become boring. The same could be said for the show as a whole.