Pop Music Reviews : BoDeans Get a Late Start Stirring Things Up at the Variety Arts Center

The Variety Arts Center can be a tough room to warm up: When people get comfy in the theater seats, the place has all the rocking intensity of a freshman psychology lecture. As tedious as crowd-prodding tactics can be, the BoDeans should have resorted to cliches Thursday night if that’s what it took to stir things up.

As it was, more than half the show was good to great music evaporating in a dispiritingly tame atmosphere. That made it a bit of a letdown for a band taking its important second step in what was projected as a sky’s-the-limit career after the Wisconsinites debuted last year. It took Beau Neumann’s guitar-soloing stroll into the audience to create the high-energy, on-your-feet scene that should have been going all along.

That impulse to just rock out covered the slight case of confusion about where the BoDeans go next. In the current “Outside Looking In” album, they abdicate the “roots” leadership that came their way with last year’s “Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams,” and if it’s unclear where they might end up, there was something invigorating Thursday about their scramble from pop-soul to commercial, late-’80s radio-rock to vintage rock ‘n’ roll et al.

The clearest road sign is E Street--and they didn’t go out of their way to obscure that influence, delivering a BoDeaned version of Springsteen’s “Atlantic City.” The band has added keyboardist Susan Julian to thicken the sound and boost the attack, and new drummer Bill Conlon has upped the power of the resounding drum shots.

Their own best assimilation of the Bruce thing was “Say You Will,” a bittersweet invitation that captures some of the trembling tenderness of a youthful heart beating in small-town America.

Neumann and Sammy Llanas remain rock’s best new odd couple, and the alternation of the former’s pure, young-Jackson-Browne singing and the latter’s inimitably clenched, raspy spit helped keep the pace brisk.

The new album may not be a breakthrough, but there’s certainly no dry-out factor, and the best of the new tunes have the ability to rouse and caress as intended. A couple of unrecorded selections Thursday paid homage to Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Sun Records, but the BoDeans don’t need to go retro. Backed by their natural, two-of-the-guys unpretentiousness, Neumann and Llanas come up with songs that seem already to be somewhere far back in your memory, subliminal echoes of the essences of rock classics.