O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Battle of the Bands Picks the Finalists : Judges at Bogart’s choose the Fullerton band Trip the Spring to lock horns with This Great Religion on Wednesday. But of the five groups, the one most worth tuning in to was Standard Fruit, a quirky Placentia band.

Friday night’s semifinal round of the Texas Tuneup band battle at Bogart’s shouldn’t be confused with Armageddon, but it did prove, at least to your humble scribe, that the last shall indeed be first.

In the estimation of a six-judge panel, the best of the evening’s five unsigned, Orange County-based competitors was Trip the Spring. The victorious Fullerton band will now carry its palette of atypical late-’60s British folk and progressive rock influences into the Tuneup finals Wednesday night. Its opponent will be another Anglophile band, This Great Religion, which won a previous semifinal round. The prize will be a trip to Austin, Tex., next month to play a concert showcase at the South by Southwest Music Festival, a veritable feed trough for record company talent scouts.

While Spring or Religion will get the spoils, Standard Fruit, pegged dead last Friday on the judges’ score card, emerged from the Tuneup as the act most worth tuning in to.

The Placentia band was more than a little strange but thoroughly engaging. Its 35-minute set of light and sprightly pop was marked by quirky humor, but it was humor alloyed with poignancy in songs depicting the stunted relationships of characters suffering from sorrows uncomforted and ardors unrequited.

Standard Fruit’s five members basically looked like nerds--three of them seemingly young enough to be high school freshman nerds (actually, the youngest member is 23). The band called to mind a troop of Boy Scouts with a slightly demented scoutmaster--namely, singer Denys Gawronski, who performed most of the time with a wild gleam in his narrow-slitted eyes.

Gawronski zestfully play-acted the songs’ hangdog character roles, coming off like a blue-collar, less self-consciously artsy version of the Smiths’ singer, Morrissey. Gawronski and guitarist Andrew Lowery, who also sang leads, both were unpretentious hams who took obvious pleasure in performing. Behind them, the other players were unassumingly solid in support, providing coursing bass lines, spare but apt guitar accents and the occasional oompah beat (one song was a European cabaret-style number that featured Gawronski on accordion).

Near the end, Standard Fruit showed another dimension, setting aside zaniness for a touching, yearning elegy/lullaby in which delicate guitar parts circled around a sad, warm clarinet line from Jerry Renek, who otherwise played drums. An encore, “Clumsy Dog,” was a fetching bit of pop that echoed the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.” It capped the set with a blend of qualities that seemed representative of this refreshing band: sweet, funny but a little crazed.

Standard Fruit’s arrival recalled the emergence of the excellent Orange County band, Eggplant, at a similar contest at Bogart’s about two years ago. That night, the judges rated Eggplant third in a field of four. But proving who is best isn’t the real point of contests such as the Tuneup, which is sponsored by Bogart’s and the Pacific News & Review (staffers at the club and the alternative paper picked the contestants and recruited the judges). The real value lies in giving unproven local bands the chance to perform in the special atmosphere of anticipation and challenge that competition brings.

Naked Soul, which finished second, was another band that responded well to the challenge. Pared down to a trio after a series of lineup switches, singer-guitarist Mike Conley and company still haven’t figured out how to avoid being compared to (and inevitably overshadowed by) the Replacements. But being a lot like the Replacements means having a lot of admirable qualities--the chief ones being a raw, convincing emotionalism, a frayed but intense aural attack and a sure sense of pop craftsmanship. Those all came across during the band’s half-hour set. The only drawback was the sameness of tone and feeling in Conley’s songs: all of them overcast numbers about heartbreaks and frustrated yearnings. Naked Soul is like a promising but unfinished minor league pitcher: good fastball; needs to develop a curve so the hitters won’t sit back waiting on the high, hard one all the time.

The winners, Trip the Spring, played impressionistic, mood-weaving songs that didn’t yield the focused, specific emotional payoff that Standard Fruit and Naked Soul provide. But the band’s strong musicianship clearly scored points with the judges. Andy Hong’s playing on fretless electric bass was flexible and punchy, with an exceptionally warm, presence-filled tone. The other outstanding member was singer/flutist Liana Dutton, whose singing on “Old Salt” blended airy textures and tawny hues after the manner of Sandy Denny, the great folk-rock diva of Fairport Convention. Dutton (she’s the sister of Burning Tree’s bassist, Mark Dutton) had to share the singing spotlight with her cousin, Kevin Dutton, who came off like a reedy-voiced, generally untuneful version of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson.

Besides Fairport and the earliest, jazziest incarnation of Tull, Trip the Spring at times echoed early King Crimson’s milder moments, and a show-closing group harmony number sounded as if it might have been inspired by the Incredible String Band. These are all interesting and potentially fruitful influences, but they also can easily lead a band into pretention and self-indulgence. Trip the Spring didn’t avoid that trip-up on songs that flowed along, sounding full of portent but never quite getting to the point--leading one to wonder whether there was a point. Still, this is a skilled group that could prove worthwhile if it can find more concrete structures, more specific song content and better-honed melodies. In that, it resembles its Wednesday night opponent, This Great Religion.

The third-place band, Medicine Rattle, tries hard to be a sassy roots-rock unit, a la X. The fact that it has to try so hard is its biggest problem. A hot-rocking roots band gobbles musical turf as easily, powerfully and voraciously as a Cadillac eats the road. Medicine Rattle was more like a Volkswagen, sputtering as it strained to keep up the pace. Singer Melanie MacDowell wanted to be a red-hot rockabilly mama but she couldn’t muster the vocal heft the job required. The constant flutter and incipient yodel in her voice was evidence of too much effort and became tiresome after a while. Her indecipherable diction was no help, and being buried in the mix made matters worse.

Medicine Rattle came up with some good tunes, especially the soul-tinged ballad, “Get Back Home.” The set almost ignited for a while in the middle when guitarist Michael McCarthy began spinning out well-greased Keith Richards licks. Overall, though, the band needs a medicine ball more than a rattle. Work out and bulk up.

Nevada Time, which finished fourth, was an amateurish band in the nice sense of the word--an amateur being somebody who does something out of love. The group’s four aging, salt-of-the-earth types aren’t what the label scouts are looking for, and they probably know it. They played an earnest, yeomanly set of straightforward rock songs and came off as a bunch of regular guys who love rock enough to keep at it as an outlet for their ideas and passions. Not really a band to admire, but one to respect and, in its modest sphere, to enjoy.

Stephen Zepeda, Bogart’s booker, said the vote, based on a system in which judges could apportion up to 25 points among the bands, was: Trip the Spring, 46; Naked Soul, 30; Medicine Rattle, 29; Nevada Time, 24; Standard Fruit, 17.

The judges were Jan Chouillon, sales representative for WEA record distributors; Marge Falcon of Warner Bros. Records promotion department; Sam Lanni, local band manager; Linda Mello, co-owner of the Doll Hut; Nikki Sweet, promoter/publicist of the Coach House, and Scott Walewski of Chelsea Books.