POP MUSIC REVIEW : Blah, Rastafari! Springsplash Is Barely Lukewarm : The reggae show at the Coach House was nearly devoid of vision and depth. Lots of energy at times, but no personality.

If Ziggy Marley or any of the other new generation reggae performers ever come up short on material, perhaps they could take a cue from country music mavericks like Hank Williams Jr. and Waylon Jennings and start writing songs looking inward at the music itself.

Reggae lyrics do fine at skating the spiritual plane or damning apartheid, but the Jamaican-born music has hit such a doldrums that songs asking “Don’t You Think This Rasta Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand?” or “Would Old Bob Have Done It This Way?” couldn’t hurt.

The Reggae Springsplash show Sunday at the Coach House featuring Freddie McGregor, Mikey Dread, special guest U-Roy and backing band Lloyd Parks and We the People may have offered up lots of enthusiastic dance music, but it was nearly devoid of the vision, depth and invention that the late Bob Marley and others brought to the world in the early ‘70s (earlier, if you want to count Desmond Dekker’s 1969 one-shot “The Isrealites”).

Reggae then was the most distinctive music to hit these shores since the Beatles (with certainly the most distinctive hairstyle), and like the Beatles’ advent, it couldn’t have come at a better time. Between disco and Deep Purple and groove-less techno-rock, music seemed to be at a dead-end to which reggae’s new rhythms, soulful voices and spiritual/political intent were a fabulous antidote.

But the trail Marley led has since become a rut, with the rote calls of “Jah, Rastafari!,” deification of Haile Selassie (which always confounded Ethiopians who actually had to live under Selassie’s muddled rule) and more recent gluts of Mandela fandom taking on the cadence of a meaningless liturgy.

There certainly are still reggae performers who strive to reach the heart--notably Burning Spear through the deep ties to his roots, and Toots Hibbert through his fabulously emotive melding of reggae and Memphis soul--but the Springsplash acts were a far cry from that. McGregor and Dread are energetic performers, but that’s about it. There was nothing fresh to their songs and not enough personality in their voices to rise above the two-chord sameness of most of their material.

On one hand, the show definitely offered value for the (small) audience’s ticket dollar, serving up nearly three hours of reggae beats. On the other hand, it got to be a grinding, interminable bore.

Bassist Parks and We the People, who opened the show and backed the other performers, are capable musicians but only their drummer--who mixed island and New Orleans rhythms with a military snap--gave their backing any color.

Dread, like McGregor, emphasized the more lightweight, pop-bent side of the music. His six songs included the bubbly “Happy Family,” the slow-grooving “S.W.A.L.K.” and “The Source of Your Divorce.” He turned the remainder of his set over to surprise guest U-Roy, a historically important performer--he introduced the “toasting” style of reggae that influenced American rap music--but his three songs gave little opportunity for him to really strut his stuff.

There were few tunes in McGregor’s 27-song distance swim that surfaced above the spume, among them a reggae-ized version of “Guantanamera” and “Somewhere,” a ballad about the suffering of children around the globe.

But it’s not a good sign that the show’s liveliest moments were Marley songs and reworkings of ‘60s oldies. The penultimate number in McGregor’s performance was a medley of Marley’s “One Love/People Get Ready,” “War” and “Get Up, Stand Up.” The other standout of his set was a vocal reworking of the Young-Holt Unlimited instrumental “Soulful Strut.” Dread’s catchy “Choose Me,” meanwhile, may have been less catchy for older listeners who recognized it as a direct melodic steal from Barbara Lynn’s 1962 hit “You’ll Lose a Good Thing.”