Pop Music Review : Flower Power Finally Gets Across at the Roxy

The tables at the Roxy on Tuesday may have been awash with animal-rights literature as customers arrived, but there would be no sermons when Ireland’s Hothouse Flowers took the stage. The group’s only song that even begins to broach the topic, “Giving It All Away,” just tosses off a vague line about “dolphins and killing” and lets it go at that; it’s probably one of the most inarticulate protest songs ever written.

Then again, articulation and song structure have never been their strong points. The Flowers tend to deal in what their most obvious influence, Van Morrison, referred to as the inarticulate speech of the heart, and their lyrics are rarely quotable. This is a band that, as much as any blues or rock group ever did, relies on the intangibility of feel to get across.

It’s a double-edged sword: When, say, the sound mix isn’t right--as it often isn’t on the group’s new, sophomore-jinxed album “Home”--all that Celtic soul seems heavy-laden, burdened with the kind of earnest passion that invites mockery, less flower-like than boulder-like.

But when sound and emotion come together, as they did in the last half-hour or so of the quintet’s two-hour Roxy set, and that boulder builds up momentum, you might just feel transported into the presence of greatness.

With singer Liam O’Maonlai pounding quite, ah, articulately on piano, and man-a-wailin’-sax Leo Barnes furiously jamming with the rest of the band instead of simply interjecting his solo bit here and there, feverish grandiosity was finally at hand.

Less transportingly, countryman Andy White opened with an acoustic set in which seemingly every other number referred to his hometown, Belfast, by name, the sort of gambit that doesn’t travel well--not well enough, anyhow, to win much attention from the packed house.