Right, so the costumes: this time it was tennis-pro chic, summer whites and headbands and sweatsocks. Kind of a letdown, actually – New York gets Star Wars and we get . . . the Williams sisters? But the shocking thing was how great they sounded. Taking the stage to an organ-fired fanfare of Queen’s “We Are the Champions,” the 12-piece group included a string quartet (dubbed the G-Strings), three backing singers, and what sounded like the reincarnation of the Stax Records house band. It’s an article of faith among rare-groove funk enthusiasts that a copy is often better than the original, and in the process of reinventing St. Elsewhere as a spot-on, early-’70s soul revue – the backing singers sashaying cooly in place, the G-Strings monster-mashing in their seats during “The Boogie Monster” – Gnarls suggested an all-inclusive metaphor for the regenerative powers of rock and roll. “This ain’t just studio shit,” Cee-Lo said at one point, seemingly as surprised as the gathered club sluts, hipsters, and boomers. “We do this.” Gracious, casual, effortlessly soulful, Cee-Lo played party-band host even as the music veered, as it so often does on St. Elsewhere, into darkness. As he contemplated suicide (“Just a Thought”) and corpses brought back to life with blowjobs (“Boogie Monster”), you had to wonder – this is the same guy who did Cribs in a dashiki? Like some hybrid of OV Wright and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Cee-Lo was out to put the whammy on you – during “Necromancer” he wiggled his fingers like a spellcaster, and he narrowed his Lugosi-esque intensity into vampire deathfunk on the group’s two covers, the Greenhornes’ “There’s an End” and the Doors’ “Who Scares You.” “Crazy” should’ve been an anticlimax, but it wasn’t, not yet, even though they played it note for note; and what’s more, the set erased any residual doubt that their punk-intense Violent Femmes rework “Gone Daddy Gone” and their encore-closing “Smiley Faces” are every bit as powerful.

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