POP MUSIC REVIEW : Cowboy Junkies’ Slow-Growth Initiative at the Wiltern

“Does it hurt?” singer Margo Timmins coyly asked an overenthusiastic Cowboy Junkies fan who had let out a loud, adulatory Owwww! , breaking the otherwise library-like peace Sunday night at the Wiltern Theatre.

“ Does it!” shouted out another happily pained devotee.

A typical Junkies fan is indeed addicted--to salve, as it were, if not the injuring itself. This country-folk for the walking (or crawling) wounded took its usual healing course at the Wiltern, lulling and seducing, alternately brooding and soothing, almost never quickening or surprising.

If the Junkies’ highly original, wildly derivative approach doesn’t seem quite as brilliant in execution now as it did a year and a half ago, it may be that we’ve grown accustomed to this particular high, as junkies do.

Timmins’ gorgeous, whispery voice still sounds like the proverbial melting butter--albeit butter on a slice of toast about to land face-down, given the mournfulness of much of the material. Her brother Michael Timmins is still writing amazingly conversational and tuneful interior monologues, and the pair of new songs previewed continue in the same tranquil direction; the group seems to have voted upon some sort of slow-growth initiative to conserve its comforting sound. This may not “do” forever, but it’s awfully enticing still right now.

If you accept their stasis as a comfort, the only major complaint about the Junkies (who also play Wednesday at the California Theatre in San Diego and Thursday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano) would be about how Timmins suggested she could wail early on, during Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil,” then settled the rest of the show for the kind of wistfulness that was easily overpowered by the seven musicians on stage, all the way to being trampled by an intrusive harmonica on “You Will Be Loved Again.” Ow.