POP MUSIC REVIEW : Concrete Blonde Rises Out of Darkness for Playful Performance

There’s no good reason why the names Concrete Blonde and Johnette Napolitano shouldn’t be very well known throughout the rock-loving world before too long.

After a promising debut in 1987, followed by an uneven but still creditable second album in 1989, the Los Angeles band has come up with “Bloodletting,” an excellent new cycle of dark, haunting songs. In a just world (which the pop sweepstakes most assuredly is not), “Bloodletting” would be a career-making piece of work.

Opening a two-night stand at the Coach House on Saturday, Concrete Blonde showed that it has what it takes to further its case for mass acceptance with involving live performance.

The focus is almost all on Napolitano, the singer-bassist who writes the trio’s songs. It’s hard to imagine her throaty voice ever sounding more confident, or more emotionally grabbing, than it did during this 70-minute set.

With her dark helmet of hair often hiding her face, Napolitano delivered some numbers in a hipster’s ironic sing-speak that recalled the biting side of Chrissie Hynde. But her real power lies in her higher register, where that throaty intensity makes her as impossible to ignore as a mother crying for a lost child. And in many of the show’s 17 songs, Napolitano could be heard crying out for things lost--lost lovers and friends, and a lost innocence dashed by a world that seems ghostly and threatening.

Napolitano is no gloom merchant, though. Songs like “Joey” and “Little Sister” reached out of the darkness with pleas for love (although with no assurance that anyone would be there to take the singer’s extended hand). While she wore all black, she was playful rather than somber, enjoying laughs between songs, and engaging in some mime-like shadow-play with her hands to act out lyrics during a segment in which she set aside her bass and sang with only acoustic guitar backing.

Napolitano put on a vibrant bop-and-jive performance during the stripped-down “Roses Grow,” shaking her body and belting out a rap-style chant over drummer Paul Thompson’s spare, funky beat. With its vision of roses poking through the sidewalk cracks along L.A.’s mean streets, “Roses Grow” exemplifies Napolitano’s unwillingness to let darkness overcome all hope.

Concrete Blonde’s only serious sins in this show were ones of omission--notably, the band neglected to play “Caroline,” a mysterious, gorgeously evocative song from “Bloodletting” that recalls Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon.” With three albums under its belt and a penchant for cover songs (this show included versions of Jimi Hendrix’s “Castles Made of Sand” and a concluding a cappella reading of Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz”), Concrete Blonde should think of being a little more generous, and extending its shows to the standard headliner’s range of 90 minutes.

Still, with numbers like “Joey” and the brave dirge “Tomorrow, Wendy,” Concrete Blonde didn’t lack for show-stoppers. While most of those highlights came at slow tempos, the band showed that it can rock furiously on thrashing, forward-surging numbers like “The Sky is a Poisonous Garden.”

Newcomer Thompson, an Englishman who used to play with Roxy Music, is a fine addition to the band--a far more precise and concise player than Concrete Blonde’s original drummer, Harry Rushakoff. It’s too bad that guitarist James Mankey, who has all the stage presence of a scarecrow, can’t do more to act as a visual complement to Napolitano. But his excellent guitar work offered plenty of sonic motion, from noisy distortion to clean, ferocious soloing to warm ballad accompaniments. Most guitarists in rock trios attempt to dominate, but Mankey astutely fills his role by coloring in the spaces around Napolitano’s singing.

The Slaves, who record for Concrete Blonde’s custom label, Happy Hermit, would be a pretty fair garage band if vocalist Rik L Rik would dump the mannered gothic baritone that marred many a song. The L.A. punk-scene veteran had a ravaged charisma as he sang about his one obsessive theme--relationship hell. But his drawn-out phrasing and stagy vibrato sometimes made him sound like an unintentional Las Vegas lounge parody. Things invariably would improve as soon as Rik L Rik abandoned those gloomy stylizations for his more natural voice, a straightforward rocker’s yowl. Guitarist Tex Mosley did a good job of pushing him along with solo breaks that sounded as dirty and serrated as a used razor blade.