O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Isaak Greets Year With 8 New Songs : The singer’s show at the Coach House marks the start of new decade with music that conveys deep emotions.

There seems to be some lingering disagreement over whether a new decade begins when the years turn from nine to zero, as most of us believe, or when they go from zero to one, as the people who can actually count would have us think. But in the case of the ‘80s, perhaps we can all agree that the new decade starts none too soon.

As for this past decade: Was it not just a tad cold and artificial, as if someone forgot to turn the ‘70s off and the same years just kept popping out like defective microwave dinners, half-frozen and smelling of burnt plastic? Can’t we all lay claim to some general wish, with the hope that a new year brings, that the ‘90s won’t continue to be more of the same?

At his New Year’s Eve Coach House show, Chris Isaak was certainly doing his part to usher in the new. Along with being, overall, one of the freshest, most grievously untapped talents of the past five years, Isaak greeted the year with a show that included an album’s worth of new, unrecorded songs, as well as such disparate chestnuts as Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man,” the Rivieras’ “California Sun” and Ricky Nelson’s “I Believe What You Say.”

Those who have only read about Isaak must have an image of him as this brooding, melancholy, lightless character. And, indeed, if one were to take “sad” and “lonely” out of his songs, there would be some sizable gaps. Nearly every song on his three albums deals with loss, yearning and resignation--pretty much summed up by the line “This world is only gonna break your heart” in his “Wicked Game”--and Isaak does so with a deep sense of mood, with shadings of sad unimagined by the monochromatic British gloom bands.

If he were that limited and easily pigeonholed, he’d probably have become a hit much sooner. But not only are his records a dizzying number of blue shades, but his live shows run the full spectrum of garish rock colors. At some points, his late show Monday looked like a scene right out of a beach party movie, with scores of California girls frugging onstage, tiki lights glowing above them, and Isaak and lead guitarist Jimmy Calvin Wilsey releasing torrents of reverb-drenched surf guitar.

Whether assaying the hurt in his own songs or running to the ridiculous joy of the show’s Spanish-langauge New Year’s tune, surf-toned “Auld Lang Syne,” and encore versions of “Wild Thing” and Slim Harpo’s “Hip Shake,” Isaak’s music dares to actually feel the depths of emotion rock singers used to admit to before the age of MTV.

There is more tying Isaak to an earlier age than just his teen-idol looks (sort of a cross between Elvis and Randy Travis) and garb (he even sports a tooled-leather-covered Gretsch guitar). He is presently surpassed perhaps only by K.D. Lang in capturing the longing sound of the late Roy Orbison, and most of his musical influences hark back to Orbison’s time.

But he’s far more than a retro-rocker. Rather--like John Fogerty and, to a lesser degree, the Pretenders--Isaak has taken the basic materials of rock and made those same simple changes his own, with a distinctive stamp that is recognized within a few notes.

A large part of that sound must be credited to his excellent band of Wilsey, drummer KenneyDale Johnson and bassist Rowland Salley. They rock with a vengeance and do ballads with a tear. Wilsey uses his shimmering, echo-laden surf-blues-influenced guitar as an architect might, erecting spaces both intimate and vast for Isaak’s haunting melodies to wander through.

Monday that band was augmented to include sax man Johnny Reno and keyboardist Jimmy Pew, which added yet more color to the band without upsetting the rare interplay of the unit.

The performance featured such Isaak staples as “Lie To Me,” “Wild Love,” “Wicked Game,” “Blue Hotel” and the no-brakes joy ride “Gone Ridin’,” with a typically hilarious hipster-lingo spoken intro. During “Hip Shake,” Isaak and other band members plunged into the audience, while Reno soloed atop the bar and drummer Johnson returned to the stage on crutches, spitting drumsticks out of his mouth.

But it was the dark version of Diamond’s “Solitary Man” and some of the eight new songs he sang that stole the show. Chief among those was “5:15,” a classic train song, and a soul-revue burner apparently titled “I’m Standing Up,” with Isaak’s voice flying and shouting over a chorus of the band members chanting “Robitussen.”

It’s a bold thing for Isaak to be pressing on with so much new material, since it has taken radio a year and a half to catch up with “Wicked Game,” and even then the moribund broadcast media played it only because it had been used in David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart.”

It’s a typical story: Aaron Neville was singing beautifully in obscurity for decades before Linda Ronstadt pronounced him safe for radio. It’s things like that that are transforming the United States--once the great cultural innovator of this century--into the slow kids on the block, ignoring even the talent in our own back yard. It’s been that way for nigh on two decades now, so let’s get on with the new one, shall we?