POP MUSIC

Flight of the Conchords

Almost any joke is funnier when it's delivered in a Prince-style falsetto or a Barry White-style vocal fry. Just ask Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, the New Zealand comedians who play lovably dopey aspiring musicians on their HBO series, "Flight of the Conchords." They rarely broke character on Friday at Lisner Auditorium, where, despite playing two sold-out shows, the pair acted very much like their TV band, which can't get booked at anything besides open-mike nights and the odd show at an aquarium.

Part of the Conchords' charm is their supposed cluelessness -- introducing "Think About It," the band's song about "children on the street . . . killing each other using knives and forks," McKenzie said it was about issues like poverty, war, famine -- "anything that Bono's into, really."

The irony didn't get too thick, though, for a couple of reasons. First, Clement and McKenzie are very good at arranging their absurd songs, whether expansively, as on their recent eponymous album, or simply, as when they perform live; somehow, McKenzie's late-set keytar solo and Clement's turns on a digital saxophone didn't overpower the songs, mostly played on acoustic guitars. Second, their between-song banter is hilarious. Asked by an audience member where Murray, the duo's only slightly less dimwitted manager on their show, was, Clement said, "We get asked that every night. We have to tell people he's fictional. He's in the same place as Pegasus." McKenzie, he noted later, was "one of the most popular members of the band."

Even though many of the jokes were obviously familiar to the audience, the crowd roared anew at songs like "Business Time" (about married people's sex lives) and "Robots," a song about "The distant future/The year 2000," when humans had been eliminated by machines. "That confirms a theory that I've had" about Washington, Clement said of the crowd response. "That you're all robots."

-- Andrew Beaujon

The Cure

Arefrain from "Lovesong" describes the ebullient crowd at the Cure concert Friday at the Patriot Center: "Whenever I'm alone with you/You make me feel like I am young again."

The primarily middle-aged audience sang, clapped and -- even if it annoyed those in the row behind -- stood and danced for three hours to 39 songs culled from 30 years of gloomy-to-jovial alternative rock.

And yes, frontman Robert Smith, at 49, still wears the Goth-clown makeup and has a Medusa-like head of hair (albeit possibly with a bald spot). But the look still works for him, a la Keith Richards and his 64-year-old pirate persona.

This edition of the Cure is stripped down to four members, with Smith and Porl Thompson manning the guitars, Simon Gallup still wielding a low-slung bass and drummer Jason Cooper thumping away behind them all. And though there were some triggered synth sounds in the mix, the group revamped keyboard-heavy songs such as "The Lovecats," "The Walk" and "Close to Me" into guitar-woozy rock tunes.

The Cure even plugged two new numbers into its hits-heavy set list: the straight-up guitar popper "The Perfect Boy," which Smith said was a "world premiere," and "Freak Show," which fell next to the peppier (even silly) songs in Smith's enormous repertoire.

But for the most part, the concert was about the Cure's glorious past, and when the band played "Friday I'm in Love," it summed up the audience's adoration for a band it grew up with.

-- Christopher Porter