POP MUSIC REVIEW : Skid Row, Pantera: An Odd Couple

“Beauty and the Beast” was playing Saturday night at Irvine Meadows, but this version wasn’t rated G.

Beauty was Sebastian Bach. Lithe and handsome, with flowing blond tresses that women might well covet, he is the heavy metal pinup boy (rated R for language) who fronts Skid Row. The Beast was Pantera, a growling Texas hard-core metal band made up of shaggy, bearded scruffs, except for singer Philip Anselmo, who is a shaven-headed scruff.

Beyond Bach’s comeliness, Skid Row had nothing distinctive to offer. The hot-selling (two platinum albums in two tries) New Jersey band’s songs lacked grabbing melodic hooks, although that didn’t stop an impromptu chorus of thousands, most of them female, from singing along almost nonstop. Bach’s voice was certainly no thing of beauty--a generic metal squall-and-yell that faltered in its high range, lost steam as the show went on, and most of the time sounded less than muscular amid a fuzzy sound mix.

Bach did supply the requisite physical energy, cantering back and forth across the stage, jumping from a raised platform, striking titanic poses while singing the big, sustained notes (back arched, head and free arm thrust back in a limbo-dance stance, leaving pelvis front and center). Bach also deftly revived the fast-vanishing rock ‘n’ roll art of the microphone-cord lariat toss, now nearly done in by wireless technology.

He observed heavy-metal tradition by offering both a triumphant theme for the evening (much-reiterated delight at selling out Irvine Meadows) and an enemy to dump on: “people who try to analyze . . . heavy metal” instead of realizing it’s just for getting crazy and having a good time.

While we Calendar-writer types usually hold to the Socratic notion that the unexamined life is not worth living, in Skid Row’s case it’s probably wiser to concede the point to Bach. There really isn’t anything there worth analyzing.

When the pace and action were rapid, as in an early sequence of short, punchy songs, this was a serviceable metal show. When the pace lagged it was something less than that.

A pointless drum solo cut off that strong early run. Bassist Rachel Bolan took over lead vocals for a garage-sounding version of the Ramones’ “Psychotherapy,” which was a welcome departure, but one that left this crowd inert--either because Skid Row’s fans didn’t know from the Ramones, or because they only had eyes for Bach, who left the stage after explaining that he only likes heavy metal and doesn’t do punk rock.

At all times, slowing the tempo proved to be a bad idea, especially when Skid Row followed an insufficiently heavy slow-tromping number, “Mudkicker,” with the existential Angst ballad “Quicksand Jesus,” one of the band’s few departures from its usual thematic diet of lust and youthful rebellion.

Things picked up again down the stretch, although it was no thanks to a sloppy encore rendition of “Train Kept a Rollin’ ” with guest appearances by Guns N’ Roses members Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum. Bach introduced it as an Aerosmith song; if he had ears for anything but heavy metal, he might realize that they inherited it from the Yardbirds, who did it in the ‘60s, and from Johnny Burnette’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, whose mid-’50s rockabilly, performed without drums, is exponentially more wild than anything we’re ever apt to hear from Skid Row.

Pantera was not the likeliest match for Skid Row. In style, it’s closer to the punk-influenced metal of Suicidal Tendencies than to the traditional, bad-boy heavy metal Skid Row plays. The band wants to feed brain food to an audience while battering it with sonic aggression. Inner turmoil and outward struggle are its themes, in a kind of Nietzschean scheme that emphasizes reaching for power and clarity and climbing out of the dulling murk of normal existence.

The dulling murk of a poor sound mix attenuated most of Pantera’s hourlong opening set. With his howling rasp of a voice, Anselmo seems like a younger brother to Henry Rollins, the former Black Flag ranter, and to Mike Muir of Suicidal Tendencies. On record, it can be bracing. Live, the words were muffled and the emotions behind them were also lost, although the band and Anselmo did bring convincing heft to “Walk” and “A New Level,” both from Pantera’s current album, “Vulgar Display of Power.”

As delighted as Bach was at playing a large, packed amphitheater, Anselmo seemed to bridle against it, protesting repeatedly that he missed the up-close contact with fans that a smaller hall allows, and the stage-diving that Irvine Meadows’ security doesn’t allow. While this may not have been the ideal setting or crowd for Pantera, its set was reasonably well-received.

Some fans seemed more kindly disposed toward Pantera after Anselmo took a break and turned over the singing to guest shrieker Rob Halford of Judas Priest for two Priest covers.