Gipsy Kings: Playing a Safe, Lively Sound : High-spirited rhythms are crowd-pleasers, but there’s no variety to spice things up. The band performs Tuesday in Irvine.

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 singing about. But that didn’t matter. it’s the instrumentation that the heart of this giddy, fun, party-time 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. Most of it sounds like a variation of one song. Musically, the group hasn’t advanced much since its first album, “Gipsy Kings,” appeared in 1988.

With such a fertile, varied base, the Kings, who also play Irvine Meadows on Tuesday, 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.

Clearly, fans like the music just the way it is, so it’s doubtful that the group is going to change its music just to please some grousing critics.

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. In the past, such seating was limited to one area.

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The Gipsy Kings play Tuesday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, 8800 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine. 8 p.m. $27.50. (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).