POP MUSIC REVIEW : Wire Train on a Track Well Traveled

Back in the mid-’80s, San Francisco’s Wire Train was briefly a leading entry in the post-R.E.M. alternative-rock sweepstakes, with its derivative but attractive song “Chamber of Hellos.”

After a three-year absence, the band operated on Sunday at the Roxy largely in the shadow of current alternative-rock contender World Party--no big surprise, considering that Wire Train guitarist Jeffrey Trott toured as a member of that band earlier this year. But the problem then is the problem now: Singer-songwriter Kevin Hunter has neither the moxie nor the mystique of R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe or Party chief Karl Wallinger.

For much of Sunday’s hour-plus show the quartet (augmented by a keyboardist) did an adequate job of covering the same expansive kind of Dylanstones territory that World Party often travels. But simulation was all it was: Hunter and crew lack the vision to make it more.

Not that Hunter doesn’t want to be seen as a visionary; he seems to want it real bad . The nadir came with “Tin Jesus,” a ponderous attack on organized religion with music that sounded like an excerpt from Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.” In the band’s best new song, “Spin,” some legitimate rock momentum was cast aside in favor of a brief psychedelic diversion in which Hunter quoted “Light My Fire” and “Let’s Spend the Night Together” like words from God.

And then there was an encore of Neil Young’s “Mr. Soul,” during which Hunter coaxed the crowd into free-form “hippie dancing.” As if it was ancient history, Hunter explained, “The hippies didn’t like rules very much.” But he should remember that the music figures he refered to did follow an inviolable rule: Shut up and rock.