POP MUSIC REVIEW : Gun Club Takes Another Shot, but New Lineup Is Not Quite on Target

Proving you can’t keep a good band down, the Gun Club--noted for changing musicians more often than UCLA goes through basketball coaches--has emerged after a 3-year hiatus with its surest lineup yet.

This year’s model--singer-front man Jeffrey Lee Pierce, guitarist Kid Congo Powers, bassist Romi Mori and drummer Nick Sanderson--is capable of generating a more focused fury in rendering the band’s menacing kitchen-sink rock than past lineups.

Playing Saturday at Night Moves in Huntington Beach, though, the Gun Club showed that applying more skill and sinewy force to its sprawling musical mixture doesn’t necessarily keep the performance from being a mixed bag. The foursome covered considerable ground, often navigating through that furious country-blues swampland Pierce staked out years ago.

But the always mercurial outfit also seemed to be flitting from style to style as it served up new songs ranging from the gliding, atmospheric “Yellow Eyes” to the barreling sonic train “Bill Bailey”--both from the recent “Mother Juno” LP--and leaped back a few years for such noggin-rattling rave-ups as “Sex Beat.”

It could have been a fully stirring, truly triumphant evening.

But the new Gun Club was dogged by the unevenness that often plagued the old Gun Club--and Pierce seemed oddly disconnected from the proceedings. He sang with his usual quivery passion, but he’s far more subdued on stage these days and one of the few times he spoke to the audience was to acknowledge that he’d started in on the wrong song.

Everything just seemed a little off Saturday, despite some fine new material and a strong new lineup.

Maybe it was just an off night?