POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Hits and Misses From Gipsy Kings

The Gipsy Kings, the flamenco-pop group that opened the Greek Theatre’s new season on Friday night, is great on one level, but a bust on another.

When it comes to crowd-pleasing world-beat music, it doesn’t get any better than the high-spirited sounds of this band from southern France.

On Friday, the dance-happy crowd couldn’t sit still, moving to the rousing rhythms of this exotic hybrid, which is rooted in the music of North Africa, France and Spain.

At a Gipsy Kings concert, there aren’t many ballads, so you hardly ever sit down. Most of the music, such as “Bamboleo”--the group’s biggest hit--is performed at blazing tempos and powered by eight acoustic guitarists intensely strumming flamenco, samba-tinged rhythms.

This family group, made up of brothers and cousins and led by singer Nicholas Reyes, sang and talked in a Gypsy dialect. So if you only speak English, you never knew what they were singing about. But that didn’t matter. It’s the instrumentation that’s the heart of this giddy, fun, music.

That’s the good part.

The bad news is that there’s not much complexity to this music. The intensity and appeal of the rhythms often mask the fact that this is predictable, homogenized material that’s just a few steps above elevator music.

With such a fertile, varied base, the Kings should enhance their sound and experiment with other blends and directions. But they’ve ignored risky detours and stuck to the safe, gold-plated mainstream.

When fans did sit down, they were more comfortable than in past years at the Greek. That’s because about two-thirds of the 6,100 seats are new. Also, as part of the Greek’s remodeling, seats in all parts of the venue are accessible to the handicapped.