POP MUSIC REVIEW : Reggae Pato-Tudes Accentuate the Positive : Sunny, sincere Banton pleases a young Coach House crowd, but without the moral weight he strives for.

Reggae singers who take their form seriously have it tough. It’s not enough that they possess the musical virtues required of performers in other pop styles. They also have to project the stature of a leader or a priest.

For that they can thank--or blame--the roster of remarkable Jamaican musicians who brought reggae to the world’s attention in the 1970s--Bob Marley most of all, but also his Wailers cohorts Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston, and Jimmy Cliff and Toots Hibbert.

They were all great singers who projected moral weight and took liberation struggles and spiritual endurance as their crucial themes. In the Third World, which was the world they sang about, those were matters of life and death. There was no questioning their stature.

Now, along comes Pato Banton, a small, wiry Briton born of Jamaican immigrants. His talents are modest, but well suited to light pop entertainment. But Banton wants to be part of the serious reggae tradition, so he strives to be bigger than he is.

You could have put Banton on stilts; you could have stood him on a mountain top. Nothing in his concert Wednesday night at the Coach House was going to raise him to the level he sought: the level of a reggae man of stature.

That level is hard to reach with a singing voice that is not even average, much less striking. Banton knows his limitations, so he mainly favors a lighter, rap-flavored MC style of reggae performance.

Banton easily won over a young audience that was eager to be won and well-versed enough in his four albums to sing back song lyrics on command (he also got them singing along to two new songs debuted during the two-hour show). Banton’s appeal comes from some fine entertainer’s gifts--a sunny nature, a knack for mimicry and playacting, a bouncy energy.

Sticking to his lighter material, Banton stirred up some fun. He was at his best putting on a one-man skit in the middle of “Don’t Sniff Coke,” playing both himself and a cockney trying to tempt him into snorting a line of cocaine. Pato rejects the hard drug, and converts his tempter to the pleasures of pot (no evil weed according to the reggae rules of botany, but an herb of blessings--Pato recommended its use “in moderation”).

Aiding Banton was his eight-man Reggae Revolution band, which had all the moving parts of a well-made reggae engine: muscular, pliant bass, sharp drums-and-percussion duo, rhythm-oriented guitar and keyboards, plus a three-piece horn section that rendered the tart, flattened chords that are a delicacy particular to reggae. The band members shared Banton’s showman’s enthusiasm, joining him in choreographed line dances, and behaving with the zest of a hip-hop dance crew.

Those qualities help explain Banton’s hold on an audience that willingly yielded up every response he asked.

But providing a good time isn’t enough for the serious reggae singer that Banton strives to be. So he embraced the usual litany of big issues that the reggae tradition demands: peace, freedom and racial accord. And while he did so sincerely, he lacked the voice to dramatize them and the songwriting skills to make them vivid. All he offered were prosaic, commonplace generalities and slogan-like Pato-tudes, along the lines of “take a look inside your own heart first,” or “material darkness or spiritual light--what will be your choice?”

Marley, Cliff and the others, at their best, could make you see sights, sniff smells, touch flesh as they guided you into an issue. They didn’t settle for the idealistic surface below which Banton, like most current reggae singers, fails to scratch. Banton also lacked the ferocity required of a singer of unusual moral stature. Marley sang symbolically about felling big trees of abusive power with a small ax of moral right, and he told how a desperate, persecuted man might get the drop on a hateful sheriff and pull the trigger. Pato proclaimed that his role is to accentuate the positive; one of his anthems was called “Niceness.”

Banton’s big, concluding statement was “My Opinion.” Introduced in treacly fashion with the opening guitar part to “Stairway to Heaven,” it included a mass recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and a call by the singer for everyone to clasp hands and sing along to “What the World Needs Now Is Love.”

It was sincere, at least, but inadequate. Banton is about niceness. But reggae of stature demands ferocity.

On Root, an Orange County reggae band, opened with a tightly played, well-sung, if not exactly riveting set that stuck to romantic themes. It was unpretentious, serviceable dance-hall reggae.