POP MUSIC REVIEW : Mary’s Danish Sells Out the Roxy

Riding high on the local success of its debut album “There Goes the Wondertruck,” Mary’s Danish graduated from minor club status to headlining a sold-out Roxy on Thursday night. Part of the sextet’s burgeoning popularity is based on “Don’t Crash the Car Tonight,” a hot KROQ-FM item filled with enough late-night despair and rumbling, roaring energy to please the pickiest of X fans.

And X--the much admired Los Angeles rock band led by John Doe and Exene Cervenka--does mark one of the several roads the energetic Mary’s Danish travels. Singers Gretchen Seager and Julie Ritter often resemble dueling Exenes, the blond Seager’s hollow-toned drawl caroming off the dark-haired Ritter’s nasal, histrionic squall. And it works--at first.

On songs like “Mary Had a Bat” and “Hey There Man,” the women’s idiosyncratic harmonizing created a striking complement to some bluesy rock ‘n’ soul grooves reminiscent of a Haight-Ashbury party band. (How did these two former UCLA French majors develop those Southern hick accents? Chalk it up to that L.A. street-rocker/poet-discovers-Americana aesthetic that confuses country and Western with Hollywood and Western.)

But without the personality, poetic suspense and X-perience of its role models behind it, the static vocal assault eventually became an irritating drone.

But Mary’s Danish (which returns to the Roxy on Monday and Tuesday, opening for Stan Ridgway) was a delectable confection compared to second-billed Too Free Stooges, a dead-on-arrival joke band featuring two guys impersonating tacky lounge comedians in front of a trio playing hoary Cream songs and “Jesus Christ Superstar.”