Pop Music Reviews : Steve Wynn: From Velveteen to Kerosene

“Some good noise there?” Steve Wynn muttered half-rhetorically, as his five-man band touched down from one particularly sonik journey to another Telecastersphere. The show at the Sunset in Sierra Madre on Wednesday marked Wynn’s first public performance with a rock band since the dissolution of L.A.’s proto-velveteen undergrounders, the Dream Syndicate, and this mostly new outfit displayed greater range and warmth and a richer sense of texture in its musical tapestries than the old one.

While devoting most of the hourlong set to a largely excellent selection of songs from his largely excellent new album “Kerosene Man,” Wynn (who will also be at Club Lingerie tonight) threw in a bluesy, radical reworking of Creedence’s “Graveyard Train,” a version of Bob Dylan’s “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” even more vicious than the original (!), and--in a lone concession to his four-album past--an eerie, mainly acoustic version of the Syndicate’s “Medicine Show.”

Incendiary stuff--and Wynn’s new tunes burned bright beside it. Sure, everything was a little ragged--but in all the right places.