POP MUSIC REVIEW : Lillian Allen at Postnuclear

Playing only her second Southern California show Wednesday at Club Postnuclear in Laguna Beach, Lillian Allen displayed her calling of dub poet, chanting and sing-songing verses of political and social protest to a reggae music backdrop.

In her trade, it helps to have a striking, bardic presence, such as the better-known Mutabaruka. Allen, a transplanted Jamaican based in Toronto, doesn’t quite fit the bardic bill, being tiny of stature and stocky of build. She labored under another disadvantage: an audience of fewer than 20 people who were swallowed up in a room not built for intimacy.

But Allen was able to counter with considerable strengths: her four-man Revolutionary Tea Party Band, a sharp and versatile unit sensitive to the poet’s meanings and rhythms, and her own ability to convey warmth while getting beyond mere polemics and addressing the human dimension of social ills. Some songs did come off as conventional, sloganistic broadsides against oppressors, especially when echoey acoustics made it hard to catch the finer points of Allen’s wordplay. But she hit home with more closely drawn portraits, especially “Nellie Belly Swelly,” about a child impregnated by a rapist, and “His Day Came,” about a black youth who snaps in the face of racial discrimination that wears a benign face.

Instead of giving in to rage herself, Allen used bitter irony as a shield. But the 80-minute show, drawn from Allen’s two albums, “Revolutionary Tea Party” and “Conditions Critical,” left room for optimism and playfulness, too, and also for some effective dance music in surging reggae and jazzy funk veins. Allen performs tonight at the Music Machine.