POP MUSIC REVIEW : Low-Key Cole Comes Across a Bit Foggy

The asphyxiating smoke that was continuously billowed into the crowd from the stage of the Wadsworth Theatre on Tuesday night was completely at odds with the un-self-important manner of English-bred rocker Lloyd Cole. Smoke aside, Cole’s show was completely, refreshingly lacking in typical rock-show accouterments. There was enough “fog” present for an arena metal show, but the audience listened to his wily, almost whispery patter in a hush.

Rather than come out in a blaze of glory, he dryly and quietly introduced his first song as a “ditty from the early ‘80s popularized by some Scots and an Englishman”--i.e., his pre-solo-status band, Lloyd Cole & the Commotions. And the rest of the show was equally free of artifice, from the way he kept mistakenly referring to the Commotions as “the Commitments” (yuk, yuk, cough, cough) to the quintessentially self-effacing lyrics of the new “What He Doesn’t Know” (“You know just as well as I / He’s a better man than I”).

Cole’s new album, “Don’t Get Weird on Me, Babe,” may be his best yet, not just for the usual subtle emotional take on love gone wrong but for an unusually accessible, semi-jangly single--”She’s a Girl and I’m a Man,” the catchiest dysfunctional anthem on KROQ now--and an entire second side bravely devoted to fully orchestrated, Jimmy Webb-type songs.

But what works wonders on the album didn’t necessarily work live--not with a synthesizer weakly replacing the record’s essential strings, and not with Cole’s already low-key, lower-register vocals frequently buried beneath guitar in the mix. The fact that Cole can fill Wadsworth without razzle-dazzle and with sometimes hard-to-get, mature songwriting is a wonderful sign. On the other hand, it was hard not to wish for a little razzle-dazzle anyway--or at least something to make up for the album’s lost intimacy--amid all that fog.