Supergrass: A stadium-like show transplanted to a sold-out club.

Sold-out show, medium-sized crowd. Filled, but not bursting at the sides. And in the usual fashion for the times, not one single person was elevated enough—or angry, tripped-out or ripped-up enough—to move. They just stood and stared. Clapped. Yelled out whoo a few times. No moshing, banging, rustling, squirming or slamming. A hellish, media-fed, critically insightful gang of too-cool gewgaws.

Not that it would have been appropriate to bang heads anyway. But there’s just been too many times in New York shows where nothing happens. The same situation occurred when I saw Hot Snakes at this very-same venue in August.

A voice: "Oh yeah, I saw Hot Snakes in London. Everybody went crazy. It was great."

Other voice: "Fuck. New York sucks ass."

Opening band Palo Alto is an interesting phenomenon. However talented they may be, and I am not saying I know how talented they are even after seeing them, and however appropriately their sound carries the future shock of modern times, at least one thing is for certain: they suffer from an identity crisis.

They sound like Radiohead, circa first album Pablo Honey. This is because the lead singer sounds like Thom Yorke with the pleading, English-accented drone. The band follows the singer. This is what Palo Alto sounds like.

The name seemingly refers to Northern California and Stanford University. But all of them have long hair, so there goes the theory that they attended Stanford. The only words they spoke that weren’t inscrutable lyrics consisted of the following: "Thanks to Bowery Ballroom, thanks. You’ve been great. Thanks Supergrass for having us on this miniature tour. We’re Palo Alto, and we’re from Los Angeles."

Palo Alto, from L.A. That’s like a New York City band named Cambridge.

So while this band is pretty darn good, and I like their music, they have this identity problem and it transfers into their sound. They played these remarkably mesmerizing songs, part catchy and part cathartic, but they never seemed to be saying anything. Palo Alto speaks the language of rock ’n’ roll really well and hits all the right notes, and it sounds great, but there’s something missing. Anyway, it’s fine music to get high with, and I like their sampler, Five Songs, so they’re just fine with me.

The crowd is content after Palo Alto. They talk quietly, smile. They have the reasonable faces of those in their early 30s. Some gray-haired gentlemen, a few oddballs, but generally a well-behaved crowd. Not a lot of youth here tonight. I did see plenty of doe-eyed faces at the Southpaw show three days earlier, however (this being the final date of four in their promotional swing through New York to release their new album, Life on Other Planets, stateside).

Let’s say that Supergrass also has an identity crisis. Good Lord, I own three of their albums and was an early adherent to I Should Coco with all those great singles from the mid-90s. That album was such a great capture, the sound of frenetic power-pop punk and completely irreverent teenage hijinks. You really felt you were kicking around with the boys just by listening to "Caught by the Fuzz," "I’d Like to Know" and "Sitting Up Straight."

That album is a masterpiece. But since that time, the band seems to have lost its innocuous, youthful fuck-all attitude. In It for the Money is a pretty good album, if badly over-produced. Third album Supergrass sounds like In It for the Money to me, and neither compares well to I Should Coco.

All this is old news. So where are they going now? Two directions at once, and that’s the problem.

While a good number of their songs on this night were new, different and well-played, the older, more-raucous tunes seemed to trip them up. Maybe they’re tired of playing them, real tired. But what they did excel on was "Lose It" from the first album, a rollicking jam-out with a lot less of the braggadocio of other tunes from that era.

Problematic but potentially rewarding was the band’s freeing up of bassist Mick Quinn. Long the backup high-pitched voice to lead singer Gaz Coombes, he has never had his own tunes until the two we heard tonight. Both were pretty good and bass-driven, but also revealed the band’s fundamental weakness: their lack of a solid groove.

No matter how high they get or fast they play, they seemed to be four musicians (the three-piece band is joined onstage by a keyboard player) up on stage, each in his own world. Part of the blame must go to drummer Danny Goffey—his Steve Shelley style of play is welcome, but his inability to slow down tempo with anything but sixteenth notes is not.

"Pumping on Your Stereo" sounded pretty good, but, again, failed to elicit a crowd reaction. Better instead was a new one, "Grace" with a good, tight and power-tripped sound.

In the end, I knew bad things were happening when the audience’s concentration was lost and I became overly irritated by the lighting. Seems that the Bowery Ballroom installed six new rotating cycloptic droid heads, each swiveling in the same complicated pattern, burning bright circles and spots into the retinas of the hapless crowd. No wonder no one ever moves here. These catatonia-inducing mechanical babies were nothing short of painful when, during the encore, they blew through an orderly 150-gun salute, flashing enough wattage to make Stevie Wonder blink.

The Bowery Ballroom is akin to a stadium in its acoustic, audio and visual dynamics. And crowd attitude. It just happens to fit inside New York’s confined spaces and critical reflection. Supergrass played well to both crowd and venue, but never broke out above either.