POP MUSIC REVIEW : Verlaine’s Acoustic Set Lacks Electricity : The guitarist’s solo excursion at the Coach House was minus the expressive range that powers much of his music.

Like an exhibition of an artist’s preliminary pencil sketches, a solo acoustic concert by a rocker who normally operates with a full band can give beholders a glimpse of pared-down essences, of the initial, unadorned vision behind the songs.

The problem with Tom Verlaine’s solo show Tuesday night at the Coach House was that the painterly analogy didn’t always apply. Without a band and without electricity, a good deal of Verlaine’s essence got lost.

In much of his work, Verlaine is more like a master builder than a painter. Ever since he emerged in the 1970s as the leader of Television, Verlaine has been one of rock’s most inventive guitar architects. His two albums with Television, and six subsequent solo albums (including the fine new import-only release, “The Wonder”) all stand as excellent examples of the expressive capability of rock guitar. But take away Verlaine’s ability to weave meaning through layered guitar structures and electric solo excursions, and you remove a large part of his work’s essence.

Conventional rock songwriters can strip their music down to voice and acoustic guitar and still have a miniature version of a whole--a fairly comprehensive acoustic sketch of the full-color portrait they normally create with a band. For Verlaine, lyrics are often abstract and oblique--offering sufficient clues to meanings, but not the whole story. It’s left to his guitars and keyboard textures to shade meanings and to express the most intense emotions.

While Verlaine made good use of dynamic shifts and well-placed pauses in his solo acoustic guitar accompaniments, he essentially stuck to basic chording and brief fills that hardly carried the expressive weight of his electric guitar work. The solo spotlight didn’t flatter his limited voice, either.

And with a dry, detached bearing that was as coolly mellow as a graveyard-shift disc jockey’s, the gaunt, close-cropped singer wasn’t about to win over an audience with chatty charm and self-revelation--a favorite tactic of veteran solo acoustic performers (listeners who had come to hear opening singer Shawn Colvin--apparently the majority of the small audience--were hardly won over. Most of them exited early in Verlaine’s 70-minute show, leaving only 50 or so partisans to hear out his entire set).

Unruffled by the early departures (a small audience is something this influential but underappreciated underground rock hero must be inured to by now), Verlaine sang with commitment and intensity throughout his show.

It paid off on songs that followed more conventional narrative lines--notably “Words From the Front,” a straightforward monologue describing a foot soldier’s fears on the eve of battle. Verlaine brought the character to life, his voice rising and cracking at the end to convey the anguish and bitterness beneath a stoical surface.

The solo setting did help Verlaine underscore the humor in songs like the sexy “Kaleidescope” and “The Man in the Back Yard,” an unrecorded number that took a furtive, bluesy cast. The oddity of the evening was Verlaine’s concluding dip into country myth--first with a direct enough rendering of Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” then a convoluted medley of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and “I Walk the Line,” which Verlaine embellished with a deadpan tale about Cash having an encounter with the supernatural.

Fans of straightforward, silver-voiced solo acoustic performance got it from Colvin. The small, sharp-featured singer sounded far more forceful on her own than she does on her debut album, which suffers from a too-clean, too-cool production job by a team of Suzanne Vega’s cohorts.

Colvin’s songs tend toward introspection that is deeply felt, but too conventionally expressed. Live, this strong, confident singer gave the best of her songs extra presence and grit, and rounded out her 70-minute set with well-chosen, well-executed covers that included songs by the Band, Richard Thompson, Talking Heads and, in a nice, light surprise, the Foundations’ “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You.”