Let us now praise the humble touring musician—those sometimes nameless, sometimes completely obscured souls that a famous artist hires to help beef up the sound of their music so as to better fill the air inside a big venue. Go to enough arena or stadium shows and you’ll see some variation of this. When I saw Drake, he had a full band hidden away in a recessed part of the stage. Fleetwood Mac—after Christina McVie rejoined and before Lindsey Buckingham was fired—had a couple of gents playing keyboards and guitars, who were visible but far enough away to not pull focus from the stars of the show.

British folk/alt-rock ensemble Mumford and Sons have followed suit over the years. As their venues and the audiences they perform for have grown, so has the membership of their band… at least temporarily. Last night at the Moda Center, the four core members of the group quietly took the stage and then were joined by five additional musicians: a gaggle of multi-instrumentalists and a drummer. Par for the course and all the better to make opening track “Guiding Light” sound as grand as it does on their most recent album Delta.

But just as soon as that song had finished, the guest musicians were gone and Marcus Mumford and Co. had moved to a smaller stage, set in the middle of the general admission section, to play a couple of tunes as a quartet. And so it went for much of the band’s two-hour set. The hired guns would appear and disappear in various combinations throughout, showing up often to bolster the Delta material then skedaddling when their employers wanted to dip into their back catalog.

That constant movement felt like a perfect reflection of the push-pull that seems to be going on within Mumford and Sons. The heart of this quartet is an adherence to the rootsy, old-timey sound that inspired the four men to join forces in the first place. But as heard on Delta and their 2015 album Wilder Mind, their musical scope has gotten bigger alongside the fame. An acoustic heart surrounded by an electric skeleton.

So they pulled all the arena-ready moves. Mumford did a quick Chris Martin-type jaunt through the GA section—narrowly avoiding hugs and high fives—on his way back to the stage. Keyboardist Ben Lovett asked the crowd to light the room with their smartphones. There was a slightly fancy light show and a catwalk and roadies trying to stay hidden in plain sight. But the band kept returning to their jaunty sound of yore, with the rhythm provided by a kick drum that Mumford stomped on and Ted Dwane’s standup bass and Winston Marshall’s stiff-backed banjo playing.

The downside of all of this was that it was entirely too easy to notice the comings and goings of the people on stage because there wasn’t much else to draw the eye. The stage backdrop was minimal and non-invasive. And, despite their best efforts, Mumford and Sons aren’t really commanding presences in concert. They do all the right things—pointing to the cheap seats, hoisting their instruments into the air dramatically, etc.—but it all comes off as mannered and overly rehearsed. They may be stars, but they have no star power.

Openers Portugal. The Man, on the other hand, did exactly what a band is supposed to do in an arena setting. They paired every song in their short set with psychedelic visuals and peppering in a bunch of crowd-pleasing nods to other, more famous artists (Pink Floyd, Metallica, Rolling Stones). But most importantly, they pandered. Oh, how they pandered. This is their hometown and they weren’t going to let anyone in the room forget it. (This is a band that calls themselves the “Lords of Portland,” after all.)

Everyone in the group wore personalized Blazers jerseys. Throughout, they projected quotes from Damian Lillard and Clyde Drexler, as well as references to Ramblin’ Rod and Jim Spagg, on top of the trippy animations. And at the end of the set, as they ambled through a version of their big hit “Feel It Still,” they brought out the Blazer Dancers, Blaze the Cat, Timber Joey, and Dillon the Pickle to dance and fire t-shirt cannons into the crowd. It was a cheap ploy and a silly one but damnit, it worked wonders.