WEEKEND REVIEWS : Pop : Bland Boston Soldiers On

Finally, after nearly 20 years, there is scant reason for continued critical vigilance against Boston and its pompous corporate-rock brethren. The overstuffed beast that fed well for so long is starving in the ‘90s, and it is hard to imagine that upcoming rock ‘n’ roll kids, raised on the raw meat of punk and grunge, will ever toss aside the emotional realism and sonic edge that they now demand in favor of the shiny, processed sounds, phony grandeur, party-hearty boogies and hopelessly sappy ballad doggerel that are Boston’s never-changing hallmarks.

Boston’s show Saturday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre (the band was also scheduled at the Greek Theatre on Sunday) played to a two-thirds capacity house of about 10,000 well-pleased fans, most of them appearing to be in their 30s and up. Touring for the first time since 1987, Boston paid as much attention to its 1994 flop “Walk On” as it did to material from three previous multi-platinum albums that together sold some 25 million copies in the U.S.

Leader Tom Scholz and company deserve a bit of credit for soldiering on gamely with a technically solid, reasonably engaged performance. While Boston’s two-hour-plus concert was a strong showing if you take the band on its own misbegotten terms, we’ll keep up enough critical vigilance to say it was pretty awful by any standard that demands music of substance, shuns grossly inflated designs and rejects cushy sentimentality.