POP MUSIC REVIEW : Del Fuegos Band Searches for Its Stage Personality

After a mid-career derailment two years ago, the Del Fuegos band is attempting a comeback. All those empty seats Wednesday night at the Coach House showed that once a band takes a false step before it is safely established, it is not easy to lure back its audience.

Playing to no more than 100 or so listeners (some of whom may have availed themselves of free tickets, like the ones that were stacked near the cash register at Costa Mesa’s Music Market record store the afternoon of the show), Del Fuegos, now on its fourth album, was on the same footing as a band just starting out.

If nothing else, Del Fuegos showed that it can learn from mistakes: The 75-minute set steered clear of material from “Stand Up,” the tepid 1987 album that sapped the band’s career momentum and led to a revamping of its personnel.

On the other hand, the show did not fully exploit what is perhaps Del Fuegos’ most important comeback move of all: the release of a strong new album, “Smoking in the Fields,” which features more personal songwriting on the part of front man Dan Zanes than in the past.

Del Fuegos’ musicians, who have just begun to tour again, are probably still developing a group personality with the two new members recruited by Zanes and the band’s co-founder, bassist Tom Lloyd. While it is a solidly rocking unit that is clearly more skillful than the original band, the new Del Fuegos lineup still has not meshed to the point where it can invest those good new songs with the ferocity and depth of emotion to make them take on a special life in concert.

Part of the problem is Zanes’ limits as a singer. He has a narrow range and a growly, nasal voice that is about as pretty as a hacking cough. Some singers operating under similar handicaps turn weakness into strength by mixing up their phrasings and voicings, struggling against their limits in a way that makes their singing all the more affecting (Tom Waits and the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg come to mind). Zanes sang forcefully, but not resourcefully, which often led to a sense of sameness from song to song.

One example was “Stand by You.” A simple and touching country tune from the new album, it lost its intimacy on stage because Zanes did not bring enough of a delicate shading to his raspy singing.

It would also have helped if Zanes could have personalized the show by reaching out to the audience with effective storytelling or scene-setting on song introductions. But aside from some friendly but rather routine banter about Zanes celebrating his birthday (he turned 28 Wednesday), Del Fuegos did not try to reach out and exploit the potential intimacy of the situation--a small turnout of die-hard fans.

With music deeply grounded in the styles of such precursors as the Rolling Stones, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and Bruce Springsteen, Del Fuegos cannot lay claim to originality. By supplying enough intensity, though, it still should be able to grab hold of a listener. At the Coach House, the musicians reached that level just a few times.

Adam Roth, the new lead guitarist, is a sharp musician who consistently spun out forceful and well-etched solo lines. But he cut a somewhat hesitant and reluctant figure on the stage, which blunted the unified, all-fronts attack that a band such as Del Fuegos must mount to succeed. The new drummer, Joe Donnelly, is another strong musician but a somewhat taciturn performer.

Still, Del Fuegos never really faltered after a slow start and hit some impressive peaks. “I Still Want You” featured Zanes’ most diverse and deeply felt singing, as well as a dynamic tandem guitar passage. “Breakaway” was an urgent and catchy new song, while “No No Never” and “The Offer” were delivered with some real bar-band rawness and fire.

Del Fuegos may not have the potential to be much more than a fiery bar band--but there is nothing at all wrong with fiery bar bands. What this new lineup has to do is turn up that fire with a bit more consistency and vocal ingenuity.

James McMurtry is another limited singer who stays pretty much on an even keel. But, opening with a three-man band behind him, the son of novelist Larry McMurtry made sense with his laconic vocal style and measured heartland rock.

McMurtry’s closely observed songs speak warily of small towns and small minds. He avoids the usual rock cliches of glorifying small-town life or, conversely, of speaking in epic terms of the escape from the stifling small-town existence.

Instead, McMurtry focuses on the toll taken by the conformist mind set of the small town, with its intolerance for thoughts or actions that fall outside accepted norms (McMurtry may well mean for us to see that this small-town way of thinking is really emblematic of the dominant American mind set, regardless of population densities and demographic particulars).

McMurtry sang the way his characters think: with a caution and reticence that comes from not expecting much from life, and from fear of what others might think should too much be revealed.

Some dryly humorous lyrical touches and the rich, energetic interplay of McMurtry’s acoustic rhythm guitar with David Grissom’s lead electric guitar gave the 45-minute set a rounded feeling.

Still, it would be good for McMurtry to drop that guarded persona from time to time and explore moments in which his characters let their emotions--touching, frightening, messy or otherwise--spill forth without restraint.