Pop Reviews : Kik Tracee Mixes Good, Cliches

Kik Tracee is an L.A. hard-rock band probably best known for its “No Rules” T-shirts and an endearingly geeky heavy-metal version of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson”--hey, the KISS songbook has been pretty thoroughly covered.

Its music is what you might expect if you crossed Warrant and Jane’s Addiction: sappy hooks, an occasionally interesting bass line, a decent drummer and a singer who cleaves to the Dionysian, depraved-rock-god school of performance but can’t really carry a tune.

Monday at the Roxy, the band veered between the texturally interesting and Strip-rock cliche--subtle, complex tribal grooves interrupted by Nixonian bursts of expletives better left deleted, modal swirls of guitar drone R.E.M. would have been happy to have invented, giving way to banal, tuneless pastiches of every song on KNAC’s playlist.

There was a very long drum solo, and jeans on the lead singer that you could have read through. The many, many young women in the capacity crowd seemed happy enough to be there.

It would be all right if Kik Tracee were just the Hollywood hair-farmer flavor of the week. The band rocks harder than a lot of those groups, though not as hard as the best. But something in the performance Monday seemed to indicate that the band is condescending to the music it’s playing, which is poison to rock ‘n’ roll.