POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Thought-Provoking Set From Stan Ridgway

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO — It was fitting that Stan Ridgway opened and closed his show at the Coach House with songs about beleaguered miners. After all, the characters who inhabit Ridgway’s dimly lit musical world always seem to be getting the shaft.

He began Friday night with “Overlords,” a futuristic sci-fi story that cast the Los Angeles rocker/role-player as a pressed laborer dreaming of escape and resistance against sinister galactic powers. A closing rendition of the fatalistic “Sixteen Tons,” dedicated to the late Tennessee Ernie Ford, gave the show a fearful symmetry.

Ridgway’s latest album, “Partyball,” is mainly about the fearsome distortions that come from dominance, power and an unwillingness to acknowledge weakness and vulnerability as our common human lot. The newer songs often featured blunt, hammering beats--a departure from the unsettled, ambient, complex music that marked much of the Wall of Voodoo veteran’s previous output.

New songs like “Jack Talked” and “Uba’s House of Fashions” were good vehicles for the pliant-faced, mime-gesturing Ridgway to play characters driven daft. But they lacked the resonance of more detailed, closely drawn earlier songs that earned Ridgway deserved praise for bringing the eye of a dramatist or short story writer to rock lyrics.

Even when simplistic or allegorically fantastic, Ridgway’s songs were thought-provoking sketches of how life is lived.