Almost Acoustic’s lovefest lacks heat

The biggest music fan at the KROQ Almost Acoustic Christmas concert Sunday might have been on the Gibson Amphitheatre stage.

During Coldplay’s set near the show’s end, singer Chris Martin playfully turned the band’s song “Politik” into a homage to the event, adapting the lyrics to the lineup: “Give me peace of mind and trust / Depeche Mode playing after us.... “

Martin also slipped the “Goin’ to Wichita” line from the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” into “Speed of Light” and saluted Saturday’s headliner System of a Down with a quote from “B.Y.O.B.” during “Spiders.”

Earlier, somnolent singer-songwriter Jack Johnson dropped a bit of the Stripes’ “My Doorbell” into one of his laid-back shuffles, and Death Cab for Cutie and Nada Surf swapped players and compliments.

That spirit of camaraderie and mutual admiration buoyed the proceedings on a night that won’t rank among the most musically memorable in the series’ 16 years, especially following Saturday’s opening-night headbanger special, when Korn, Nine Inch Nails and System of a Down formed perhaps the most potent stretch in AAC history.

If the idea is to mix together some of the biggest, the best and the freshest from the alt-rock radio station’s 2005 playlist, you couldn’t do much better than the White Stripes, which released the most daring album of any of the acts on the bill and played a one-hour set Sunday that pretty much obliterated everything else on the show.

The Detroit duo’s convulsive blues-rock journey isn’t like anything else in rock, starting with the spare instrumentation of guitar and drums. There’s also their disinclination to play clearly separated songs, preferring to string together a sort of musical stream-of-consciousness.

Singer-guitarist Jack White and drummer Meg White suggest a couple of crazed missionaries who jumped off a pickup truck and launched an impromptu revival meeting, with Jack pushing the possibilities of blues-rock guitar to its limits and singing with a pinched intensity that taps into the mysteries of rock’s Southern roots.

It’s amazing that they’ve become so popular, and the audience didn’t seem quite sure what to make of them. The crowd came to life only when the Stripes closed with their biggest hit, “Seven Nation Army.”

If it was hits they wanted, then Coldplay was their band, but as usual the ebullient Martin took the quartet’s live show far beyond a formal performance of their songs, chatting up the crowd, cracking jokes and leading the group in an acoustic turn through a Johnny Cash tribute, playing a song they wrote for him, “Til Kingdom Come,” and Cash’s hit “Ring of Fire.”

Depeche Mode’s return with a new album this year gave KROQ the chance to have one of its evergreen bands close this year’s event. But when you got past that front line (and the effervescent Hot Hot Heat on the undercard), you were looking at a stretch of mainly minor artists.

That might be all right if they were exciting minor bands. But even the best of them, Death Cab for Cutie, was a tepid presence on stage, and Sunday they were part of an alternating pattern of the languid (Nada Surf, Johnson) and the energetic (Hot Hot Heat, the Bravery).

Logistics, schedules and politics all figure in booking these shows, but it’s easy to think of a half-dozen acts from KROQ land, new and perennials, that would have given more spark to the affair, such as Weezer, Arcade Fire, Beck, the Kaiser Chiefs, Bloc Party and Matisyahu.

One other thing dampening Night 2 was the overexposure of some acts. Depeche Mode played four arena shows in the area less than a month ago, and just this year Coldplay has done Coachella, the annual KCRW-FM benefit at Gibson Amphitheatre and some big dates on its own tour. And guess what?

Give me “Spiders,” give me web,

They’re coming back again in Feb.