POP REVIEW : Cure Mixes <i> Angst</i> , Light Moments

With all Southland Cure fans’ attention on the upcoming big event at the Rose Bowl on Saturday, the British band’s Long Beach Arena concert on Sunday seemed almost like an afterthought and a warm-up. But it’s unlikely that the fans filling the football stadium will enjoy a sound as rich as the one the Cure mounted on Sunday.

Robert Smith’s onetime esoteric art-rock band now has an audience that looks like an infinite Brady Bunch, and the hard-core Cure die-hards at Sunday’s show were like black-shrouded scarecrows dotting a flower garden. But if the concert was far from the communal depression that the Cure stereotype would suggest, it wasn’t just because the audience has changed. Smith has a decade’s worth of material to draw from now, and he can compile a set that reinforces the Angst -ridden image even as it punctures it with lighter moments. This onetime spearhead of the gloom brigade even had cute little fish projected behind the stage during one song.

Between the grandiose, symphonic constructions and the older, relatively minimalist tunes--their brisk strums and lift-off hooks creating an air of bittersweet buoyancy--the concert moved along efficiently, but special moments were rare.

This lineup’s guitar emphasis yielded some intense rhythm jamming on “Fascination Street,” and Smith summoned a gripping urgency amid the crashing dissonances surrounding his closing disclaimer, “Stop loving me, I am none of these things.”

That might sound disingenuous after he had submitted to two hours of hero worship, but to be fair, he shied away from the adulation during most of the show--Smith was a shadowy figure, carefully parceling out the scream-generating gestures.

But he didn’t seem interested in elevating his remoteness to a larger-than-life, theatrical scale, either, and the absence of both immediacy and ambition left the show empty beneath its seductive surfaces.