POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Femmes Reach for Spirituality, Settle for Ruckus

Though the recording of the Violent Femmes’ most recent album “3” doubtlessly did not eat up a “Born in the U.S.A.”-size budget, the band might have been better off buying a $4 blank cassette and recording its show Sunday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano.

Where “3” often comes off as a pale, precious shadow of the band’s 1983 debut album, its songs were pounded home with life and distinction by singer Gordon Gano and Co. before a boisterously adoring capacity crowd. (The Femmes are also scheduled to appear Wednesday at San Diego’s California Theatre and Friday at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles.)

Despite the heretical presence of electric guitars, a full drum set and adjunct synth and horn players to crank up the trio’s formerly spare acoustic sound, the ever-precocious Gano was direct and effecting in presenting his spiny fables of seeking spirituality in a complex and confounding world.

Gano has apparently recovered from his side project, the Mercy Seat, a band so set in the rightness of Christian conviction that it evidently felt no need to support it with even marginally inspired music. Though possessing negligible skill on the guitar and a whiny voice that hunters could use to lure ferrets from their dens, Gano marshaled those limited attributes into an often-arresting performance.

Alongside the classic violence of such debut-album crowd favorites as “Add It Up,” “Gone Daddy Gone” and the anarchic “Kiss Off,” Gano applied an equal rage to the current “Mother of a Girl” and “World We’re Living In.” On the latter he conveyed a true agony over the perplexity of living in a time when “my brother is not my lover” and “my neighbor is not my savior,” with the band backing his troubled voice with a roiling world beat.

Conversely, the personal devotion of “Outside the Palace” was delivered with a delicacy and mood that recalled Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero, No Limit.”

While the thicket of sound raised by Gano, antic drummer Victor DeLorenzo and bass-solo monster Brian Ritchie reinforced Gano’s lyrics, it also proved too limited a musical palette to fully sustain the 23-song set. For much of the show, they left the emotion-o-meter switch on “rampage,” and, along with Ritchie’s bass sometimes eclipsing Gano’s singing, by show’s end the undifferentiated ruckus ceased to have any effect.

The other weakness in the show was that, oddly, Gano’s least-inspired moments came in the set’s directly inspirational numbers, his gospel-tinged “Faith” and “Jesus Walking on the Water.” Despite some competent fiddle sawing from Gano on the latter tune, the numbers came off as flat and dogmatic.

Unlike passion players Van Morrison and Al Green, who most definitely are in another class, Gano seems much better at confronting the problems of spirituality than its glories.

While not nearly as original as the headliners, the L.A.-based Show of Hands delivered a strong opening set that drew heavily on the sound of the early-’60s folk boom. Sporting a Peter, Paul and Mary-type lineup (one woman and two guitar-toting guys), the trio avoided comparisons with the Washington Squares, similarly aligned East Coast folkie revivalists. Where the Squares’ otherwise-well-crafted harmonies are blunted by their bereted novelty-nostalgia pose, Show of Hands seemed much more concerned with the future than the past.

Their set ranged from spoken-word, T-Bone Burnett-ish abstracts of L.A. life to the Billy Bragg-covered “Think Again,” which posits that a Soviet nation that lost 20 million people in its last major war may not be so gung ho on starting another one.

The group’s strongest original was “Man of Principle,” which, rather than the finger-pointing schisms common to ‘60s folk, instead blamed the easy compromises made in daily life: “I wouldn’t shoot another man/But I’ll pay for the gun/. . . Another man of principle.”

Coupled with swelling voices--reminiscent of early Crosby, Stills & Nash in their harmonic complexity, only edgier--the trio’s songs make the band something to catch.