POP MUSIC REVIEW : A RESTRAINED ROMP BY MOYET AT THE WILTERN

Alison Moyet has a voice unlike any other in rock--big, husky, feminine, emotion-choked--and one that has rarely been matched with the right material or producer on vinyl. Is the concert stage a forum where the Englishwoman can let loose and deliver more of the goods?

Americans had no sure way of knowing before her sold-out show Thursday at the Wiltern, the opening night of her first U.S. tour. What they found out was that she does indeed have much more in her than the meager albums showcase, but even in concert, only occasionally does she let it out.

The highlights of the show are easy to retrace: rip-roaring renditions of a couple of R&B; oldies, hinting at what she could do were she backed by a full-scale soul revue instead of her current super-slick quintet; a couple of quiet, jazzy numbers backed only by electric piano (including a melodramatic Jacques Brel ballad, in French); and a closing pair of techno-pop stompers from Yaz, the band she fronted before going solo.

What do all these disparate crowd-pleasers have in common? Little, save for the fact that none of them come from Moyet’s two solo albums of original material.

Her voice is perfectly suited for songs of anger and passion, but even when her lyrics aim for intensity, she still seems to enjoy collaborating with composers who write sweet, namby-pamby synthesizer lines. As a result, “Invisible,” which should be a song of outrage, lacks conviction on record and was actually cute in its clap-along concert version. Weaker still were the few numbers lifted from her latest album “Raindancing,” a stiff through and through.

Moyet needs a band to either push her into a frenzy or politely stay out of her way, not construct sugary, synthetic textures around her.

Opening the show in a wildly different vein was House of Freaks. The promising two-man outfit (transplanted to L.A. from Virginia) created such sufficient noisy tunefulness with just guitar and drums that only occasionally was one tempted to mentally fill out the sound with added instrumentation.