POP MUSIC REVIEW : Cruzados and Rave-Ups: Equally Flawed Offerings

Pop music certainly has its major and minor leagues and who ever wants to be called minor? In a shared bill at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano on Friday, two long-enduring Los Angeles bands--the Cruzados and the Rave-Ups--displayed very different, though equally flawed, approaches to dealing with life in the bush leagues.

Two years ago, the Rave-Ups were considered one of the Southland’s most likely bands but then were derailed by a lengthy legal wrangle with their former label. If the performance Friday was any indication, the band now is resigned to going unheard.

Front man Jimmer Podrasky came on stage with an advantage most singers lack: a songbook with lyrics engagingly balanced between sharp detail, seasoned insight and self-deprecating humor, and music that draws from America’s roots while avoiding its ruts. But for much of the 15-song set the quartet performed as if the audience had already left. Podrasky’s listless vocals barely made it to the microphone, much less through an appalling sound mix, and the music was enlivened only by Timothy Jimenez’s consistently propellant drumming and some occasionally involved country-rock solos from guitarist Terry Wilson.

Podrasky did start giving his songs their due near the set’s end, putting feeling into “This House,” a moving study of a grandmother’s bereavement when her husband dies. And he put a matchbook’s worth of fire into the signature “Rave-Up/Shut-Up.” Had the group only opened the show with the passion it reserved for its encore numbers, the atmospheric “Radio” and a jumping arrangement of “Cotton Fields,” the Rave-Ups could again be counted among Los Angeles’ Next Big Things.

In sharp contrast to Podrasky’s generally resigned approach, the Cruzados’ Tito Larriva seemed almost desperate to make major-league music, a desperation evident in the band’s new musical style. When signed by a major label (Arista) a couple of years ago, the rough, individualistic sound the band had carried over from Larriva’s punk-spawned Plugz was dropped in favor of out-of-focus, big-screen anthem rock. Now that Arista has dropped the band, Larriva has steered straight toward the lucrative metal sound.

If Larriva’s reason for changing styles is artistic rather than fiscal, it certainly wasn’t evident in the new songs that dominated Friday’s 13-song set. Abetted by new guitarist Jimmy Crespo (formerly with the post-Joe Perry Aerosmith), the foursome created an undistinguished crunchola sound located somewhere between AC/DC and Bon Jovi.

The shame of it was that Larriva gave the dreck-ish songs everything he had, with hair-flinging stage moves and a vocal delivery equal parts the late Bon Scott of AC/DC, Jim Morrison and Yosemite Sam. His fiery charisma alone elevated the new songs: “Laugh It Off,” a Stones-ish chord bash, and “The Strange Face of Love,” an otherwise ridiculous delve into occult imagery. But only the Spanish language ballad “Flor de Mal” showed the emotive impact Larriva could achieve if unfettered by the pedestrian material that filled the rest of the set.