POP MUSIC REVIEW : An Emotional Fish Flounders in L.A. Debut at Club Lingerie

The Irish quartet An Emotional Fish begs the questions, Which emotion? What fish? At its Los Angeles debut Thursday night at Club Lingerie, the mercurial band showed signs of starfish lineage but proved to be mainly flounder.

Nurtured by U2’s Mother label in Ireland, An Emotional Fish shares its mentor’s passion but little of its pizazz. Gerard Whelan is an intriguing front man blessed with an elastic voice, but ultimately his affectations smothered his appeal. At one point he ran around the half-filled club, hiding behind speakers and poles, then leaped back onto the stage to announce, “Darling, I’m home.” Later came an impenetrable monologue about little boys and girls that would have worked better as a Jim Morrison parody than a serious attempt at art.

The pretension detracted from some moments of marvelous music. The show opened promisingly with “Strange Things,” a deliciously sultry bit of sing-speak not found on the group’s self-titled debut album. And “Celebrate,” one of the few Fish songs with lyrics that aren’t self-consciously odd, sounded just as invigoratingly joyous during the encore as it did when the band played it as part of the regular set.

But the misses outnumbered the potential hits, and Whelan had to resort to telling the crowd to shut up and listen. The members of An Emotional Fish are probably still talking about the audience that got away.