POP MUSIC REVIEW : A Confined Evening With the Escape Club

Exploitative and manipulative, the Escape Club came off as yuppie overlords at the Coach House Sunday night. Messages such as “consume,” “sleep” and “obey” seemed implicit in every calculated turn of the British quartet’s otherwise undemanding music.

A bit harsh? Perhaps. After all, given the choice between living on the dole in Britain (where the group’s current No. 1 U.S. hit “Wild, Wild West” has been aptly ignored) or conquering America with puerile pop ditties, who wouldn’t go for the gold? On stage, though, the Escape Club seemed singularly unprepared to handle such success.

The band--which will be at the Roxy tonight--sounded chiefly like a bland approximation of the Raspberries doing the T. Rex songbook with an ‘80s dance beat. Though on stage for barely an hour including encores, the group fell back on cover-band versions of Tom Petty’s “American Girl” and T. Rex’s “Telegram Sam,” a wise move considering how wan many of its own songs proved.

Set amid a lackluster stage delivery, the group’s original material seemed even more derivative than on record, with “Wild, Wild West” being the standout example. While the song wasn’t without its charms, that was largely because the song is a slavish steal from Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up.” While Costello had, in turn, borrowed from Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan, he had claimed the song style as his own by altering it and pushing it in bold new directions, virtues which evidently escaped the Escape Club.