Gwen Stefani isn’t usually thought of as industrial music, but she puts on as mechanical a show as you’ll ever see.Her Monday night concert at Walnut Creek was like watching a starmaking-machinery assembly line churn out the hits. Fittingly, there were gears turning and pistons pumping on the video screens, overlooking a high-tech stage setup



Gwen Stefani isn’t usually thought of as industrial music, but she puts on as mechanical a show as you’ll ever see.

Her Monday night concert at Walnut Creek was like watching a starmaking-machinery assembly line churn out the hits. Fittingly, there were gears turning and pistons pumping on the video screens, overlooking a high-tech stage setup with multiple moving parts — treadmills, trampolines, detachable sections that moved around.

As spectacle, it was pretty entertaining in a Super Bowl halftime show kind of way. There were obvious nods to “The Sound of Music” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” not to mention queen-of-all-pop Madonna. Stefani showed boundless energy, running around the stage and the venue and even doing jumping jacks. She must have been an aerobics instructor in another life.

If you closed your eyes and just listened, however, it left a lot to be desired. For all Stefani’s physical prowess and toned figure (including her famous midriff, an asset she wasn’t shy about showing off), Stefani’s voice was thin and reedy. Not surprisingly, most of the songs had her buried in the mix.

Between Stefani’s weak vocals and all the activity whirling around her, it was hard to keep track of where she was at any given time. She seemed aware of the problem, asking at one point, “Can you see me?”

Contrast that with Christina Aguilera’s show at RBC Center earlier this month, which was just as much of an overbearing spectacle. But Aguilera’s massively powerful voice commanded attention in a way Stefani could not.

Stefani’s set was preceded by singer/rapper Akon, introduced as “the dark prince of Senegal.” Akon is coming off a rough stretch in which he lost a lucrative sponsorship deal with Verizon after footage of him dancing suggestively onstage with a teenage girl turned up on YouTube. But his 35-minute set was relatively sedate. Except for a few lyrics (and it was hard not to cringe when the video screens showed a young girl dancing and singing along to “Smack That,” oblivious), there was little about his performance to get worked up about.

Akon turned up at the beginning of Stefani’s headlining set to reproduce his vocal from her hit “The Sweet Escape,” and his voice was more audible than the star’s. Still, the uptempo stuff worked well, particularly “Rich Girl.”

Unfortunately, things got rough whenever the tempo slowed down. Stefani is an abysmal ballad singer, and her vocal on “4 in the Morning” would have gotten her laughed out of an “American Idol” audition. “Early Winter” was a Coldplay-style power ballad that went on interminably, until Stefani left the stage for a costume change and let singer/bassist Gail Ann Dorsey handle the outro vocal.

Dorsey is roughly 10 times the vocalist Stefani is, and suddenly the song worked fine. The same thing happened during the encore closer, a Stefani/Dorsey duet on “What You Waiting For?”

It was the difference between being a pop star and being a singer.

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