Review: Live: Disclosure wrangles ‘Caracal’ and big crowds at the Sports Arena

Disclosure is the dream of dance music in 2015. The very young English production duo is popular enough to score pop smashes like “Latch” and A-list guest vocalists like Lorde, the Weeknd and Sam Smith on their new, second LP, “Caracal.” They’re progressive enough to sneak deep house and twitchy British two-step sounds into arena shows, like the one they headlined Tuesday night at the L.A. Memorial Sports Arena, the first of two this week.

But while they’re at the height of their powers, they now have a trickier job onstage. Are they a live band with an underlying club-music influence, or a house-music duo that occasionally breaks out some percussion and bass guitar? How should they translate their pop singles and long, languid tracks into the kind of arenas they’re playing? Are they redefining live dance music for huge crowds, or trying to have it both ways?

Their trim, single-packed set on Tuesday suggested the task remains a tricky one.

For starters, just getting into the arena was a mess. Hundreds of paying fans were left stuck without their tickets at a practically nonstaffed Will Call line outside, which didn’t abate until close to an hour into the set (meaning those fans missed more than half the show). Even a venue security guard, quietly waving a reporter into the show after some pleading, admitted “this whole thing is a disaster.” The Sports Arena may be a perfectly fine supporting venue during FYF Fest, but for large-scale dance music shows like this, something has to change to get fans safely into the venue on time.

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Once they were inside, Disclosure had to win them all back over. For most of the sweat-fogged young fans on the floor of the arena, they seemed to pull it off.

The band has found its sweet spot of slower tempos and riled-up soul that lends their live sets such a distinct pace. Instead of club music’s typical straight 4/4 kick drum, their songs slink and writhe to more complex, human rhythms. But they still thump with the prerequisite sub-bass and echo-saturated vocal samples that good house music needs. The successes of their major 2014 set at Coachella and a leaner, tribal techno DJ set at Electric Daisy Carnival this year suggested they have the talent to play both sides.

But a headlining arena show is its own animal. Disclosure didn’t quite stick the landing between putting on a rock-sized spectacle and getting out of the way of its club-music imperatives. It’s perhaps the same reason Daft Punk hasn’t yet toured behind its own guest-laden, live-band-driven “Random Access Memories”: How do you believably replicate a project so vast for the size of crowd that wants to see it?

Much of “Caracal’s” pop appeal relies on enormously famous guest vocalists that, understandably, can’t show up for every show. Even for this marquee Los Angeles stand, the guest list was trim -- the rising Lion Babe sashaying for “Hourglass,” Brendan Reilly joining in the mellow “Moving Mountains.” But they all came at the end of the night, and the vast majority of Disclosure’s set was a uniform look -- Howard and Guy Lawrence on opposite banks of synths, drum triggers and guitars, with some fairly standard LED wall imagery behind them.

The more hot-blooded tracks, like “Bang That” and the Gregory Porter-featuring “Holding On” (a new fan favorite), did well in this setting. The brothers deserve accolades for introducing more live instrumentation into their set, and for challenging the cheeseball spectacle that most arena-sized EDM shows have become today. But the end result was something not quite clubby enough to lose yourself in, yet not quite enough to watch on its own.

Only when Sam Smith emerged at the end for his suite of singles -- the regal “Omen” and, of course, “Latch” -- did the show finally fulfill its dual promise of pop enormity and underground appeal. Disclosure helped make Smith a pop icon, and he genially returned the favor here. But it did make one wonder how Disclosure will continue to pull this kind of show off without that reliable vocal star power.

This is all only a problem because of the importance of the job they’ve set out for themselves -- to be both the biggest and best live band in club music. They aren’t there yet (and actually getting their fans inside arenas to see them would go a long way). But if real, soulful house music has a place in American arenas, they’ll be the ones to find it.

Follow @AugustBrown for breaking music news.