Pop Music Reviews : Enigmatic Soup Dragons’ Acid-Rock Flashback

In these days of fierce competition for young rock fans’ favor, you’d expect a group with the underground credentials of the Soup Dragons to come on strong. But in its L.A. debut on Tuesday at the Roxy, the Scottish quartet was so light on the attitude that it ended up bland. Singer Sean Dickson has the look of a potential rock ‘n’ roll character, but he spoke only to announce the songs. Whether it from was shyness, arrogance or restraint, it left the Dragons a bit remote and enigmatic.

In place of personalities, the band offered an acid-rock flashback: light show oozing on a screen at the rear of the stage, drifting smoke, strobes, sheaves of light shafts angled out toward the audience. It wasn’t really close to sensory overload, but when all systems were go and guitarist Jim McCulloch intensified his playing to thicken the sound, you could pretend you were at the Fillmore in the ’67.

The Soup Dragons are pretty much a one-note band, specializing in slinky, loose-limbed, half-tempo grooves and murky, enveloping atmospheres. Dickson’s voice is locked in an adenoidal sneer, giving every lyric an ironic inflection whether appropriate or not--it’s definitely not on the the Stones’ “I’m Free,” which loses all its bracing melancholoy in the Soup Dragons’ gimmicky, reggae-dub remake.

But the show had its rewards on basic, dumb-rock levels. When the group sank its heavy beat deep into its garage-rock riffs and spiced it up with some sex-and-death imagery, and the crowd on the dance floor burst into a bobbing form of slam-dancing, you could pretend you were at a frat party in ’87.