Pop Music Reviews : Club Lingerie Show Shows the Many Sides of Turner

Pierce Turner is a hard man to get a handle on. The promotional posters that adorned the walls of Club Lingerie during his appearance there Wednesday pictured Turner’s dancing silhouette with a guitar, in a pose almost identical to popster Bryan Adams’ on the cover of his “Cuts Like a Knife” album. This couldn’t be more misleading.

At the same time, it’s easy to sympathize with the plight of Turner’s record company in its vain attempt to find some pose that would capture the appeal of their talented, trumpeted Irish-American troubadour. He’s not a poseur , it seems. And just when it seems you might think you’ve got a peg on Turner, he pulls the rug out on you, confounding expectations with a seeming lack of self-consciousness at every step of the way.

Is he an unrepentant art-rocker? Certainly the imagery in Turner’s lyrics leans toward the elliptical--and away from rhyme. If anything, his tone, accent and phrasing suggest a cross between old-style Peter Gabriel and (of all people) Marianne Faithfull. The influence of sometimes-collaborator Philip Glass is palpable in sections like the lovely few bars of minimalist piano that promise divinity in the middle of “Surface in Heaven.” And early on Turner recited verse about his Irish homeland between numbers and sang against the backdrop of black-and-white movies and slides.

Then there was the Pierce Turner who informally joked with the audience and occasionally rocked out--not to rival Bryan Adams by any stretch of the imagination, but wiggling like a true believer nonetheless. “You Can Never Know,” an epic song about the impossibility of true empathy, seemed to have Turner finding a niche that was truly his--combining big-beat rock with a wealth of strange twists. If Turner’s direction wavered somewhat at other times, it’s at least an intriguing sort of circuitous route.