In the middle of the band’s song ‘Red Oyster Cult,’ Guster unexpectedly decided to parody a classic.

Lead guitarist Adam Gardner started the riff from Blue Oyster Cult’s ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,’ complete with backup vocalist Joe Pisapia playing the emphatic cowbell for which the song is so well known. The unexpected joke sent the audience into a frenzy.

‘Sort of an easy joke,’ frontman Ryan Miller said. ‘Song’s called ‘Red Oyster Cult,’ get it?’

Guster’s lighthearted stage presence, coupled with its tight alternative sound, kept audiences from both sides of Sunday night’s double-headlined concert entertained, surprising even the most loyal fans while holding over the Ben Folds crowd in between acts.

‘You can sense they’ve been in the industry for a while,’ said Griffin Kearney, a freshman aerospace engineering major. ‘They knew how to get the crowd pumped up. They looked so natural on stage. I mean, I thought they were better than Ben Folds.’

Leading in with a pumping bluegrass beat, Guster started the night with ‘The Captain,’ a cut off its 2006 studio album ‘Ganging Up on the Sun.’ The band set the crowd off at a pace it would keep for nearly the entire set, following ‘The Captain’ with ‘Barrel of a Gun’ before ripping into ‘One Man Wrecking Machine.’ Gardner promptly stepped up on both lead guitar and vocals.

Although the first three tracks were all from the bands’ previous studio albums and were generally predictable concert openers for the group, Guster ignited the crowd after the transition from ‘Red Oyster Cult’ into ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.’

Alex Scharfman, a junior at Cornell University, had seen Guster before but said he never saw an opener like last night’s. Scharfman owns a few of the band’s live albums and called the transition a surprise.

‘They do a lot of the same things but the ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’ thing I’ve never seen before,’ Scharfman said.

The band’s on-stage antics kept on long into the set. After falling out of ‘Manifest Destiny’ and into the slower, organ-driven rendition of ‘Ruby Falls,’ with Joe Pisapia on the slide guitar, Guster picked the beat up again.

Before venturing into ‘Airport Song,’ Gardner knocked an electrical cable that sent his voice into auto-tune – a voice-morphing technique frequently used by rap artist T-Pain. Without a moment’s hesitation, Gardner capitalized.

‘Let me get some T-Pain up in here!’ Gardner yelled while his voice warped.

‘When they started making fun of T-Pain with the auto-tuner, that was awesome,’ sophomore television, radio and film major Alex Sullivan said.

Although the band’s set time was cut significantly by Folds, who played for more than two hours, Guster maintained the stage presence and crowd command of a main-stage act.

The band closed with ‘Airport Song,’ a dark techno-pop track carried by a balanced harmony between Gardner and Miller and a percussion-heavy backbone from drummer Brian Rosenworcel, who finished the night playing his hybrid kit by hand.

At the song’s finish, Sullivan, who had been waiting for more than four years to see Guster for the first time, let out a final cheer before the band departed without an encore. For Sullivan, the night was surreal and lived up to the expectations that come with nearly half a decade’s worth of anticipation.

‘They sounded great,’ Sullivan said. ‘I was really excited about most of the stuff they did – the contrast between their old and new music, everything (about) it was just awesome, it was exactly what I expected.’

ctorr@syr.edu

Published on April 26, 2009 at 12:00 pm