Pop Music : Some Not-So-Hot Gloom Rock With Sisters of Mercy

Now that the smartest depressed teen-agers are into Nine Inch Nails and the hippest are into Happy Mondays, Lush and stuff like that, such old-style gloom-rockers as the Sisters of Mercy have to try harder. Black clothing, Gothic lyrics and sunglasses-at-night have, after all, been around for quite a while now.

But Friday at the Universal Amphitheatre, the Sisters’ singer-auteur Andrew Eldritch didn’t do so well. He posed a little, danced a little, hugged the microphone stand Lou Reed-tight and moaned in a way that recalled the histrionic baritone of “Heroes”-era Bowie. He tried to make the high-school date-night crowd understand his pain--the sensitive girl in any John Hughes movie might have melted from the anguish.

Eldritch performed letter-perfect versions of his formula hits, over the sounds of a drum machine, keyboards and guitars, and a monotone eighth-note bass. He was the not-too-charismatic frontperson for an anonymous no-soul revue. (Bass player Patricia Morrison, who used to play the soulful Keith Richards to Eldritch’s Mick Jagger, has left the band.)

One thing you’ve got to say about these shows, though . . . the lighting is superb: violet beams penetrating gobbets of dense fog, intense beams of pink and green and blue, swirling tunnels of light and color that any mid-’60s production of Die Walkure would have been proud to claim for its own.

Opener Danielle Dax, who was the thinking-man’s doom-rock sex symbol when she sang with the Lemon Kittens, opened with a slick, brassy set of gloom. Death-rock, where is thy sting?