POP MUSIC REVIEW : Capturing a Monstrous Moment : A chastened but not subdued Thelonious Monster is equal to the evening, delivering songs of resonance and release Thursday night at the Fullerton Hop.

Thursday was no night for the swaggering, blustery side of rock ‘n’ roll. Only a shaken and wounded voice could properly attest to the emotions of a day of beating and burning and looting, a day on which the racial rifts and deep-seated resentments that run like a fault line beneath our social landscape had rumbled into violent life.

Perhaps no Los Angeles rock singer was more qualified to capture the moment than Bob Forrest, the singer-songwriter with Thelonious Monster. His scratchy, nasal voice has always been a conduit for pain and bewilderment, but also for a certain embattled fortitude.

Forrest walked onto the stage alone at the Fullerton Hop wearing a Dodgers cap and tinted glasses. He sat in a chair and began strumming “Lena Horne Still Sings Stormy Weather.” His voice rose with the chorus, straining with the sort of anguished, chastened hope that rises not from optimism or a rational assessment of positive signs, but from the conviction that despair simply is unacceptable.

Lena Horne still sings “Stormy Weather”

Things, they’re awful tonight, but they could get better.

And I’m just waitin’ to see which way they’ll go.

Forrest has a longstanding reputation as an outspoken between-songs firebrand willing and able to voice his liberal politics, a fellow who might cause fission in a radio control room if somebody ever put him at the same microphone as Rush Limbaugh. Performing at Peppers Golden Bear last year during the Persian Gulf War, he launched into a full-on anti-war tirade.

This time, though, he spoke in measured tones about an explosion closer to home, admitting to confusion rather than attempting pithy analysis. “I don’t know what to think,” Forrest said, and he posed a question for the small audience: “Do you think it’s wrong that the people are looting and burning, or do you think you would do it if you were part of it?” He contended that when it comes to opportunistic theft, cheating on your income taxes amounts to the “same thing.”

Mainly, Forrest and the rest of Thelonious Monster stuck to singing and playing in a show that was chastened but not entirely subdued by the day’s context. Such stormy numbers as “Hang Tough,” and the tortured emotions in the band’s clenched cover of the Blind Lemon Jefferson blues classic “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” had obvious resonance. But the band found release, too.

Thelonious, which usually operates with three guitarists, was playing short-staffed: Forrest explained, with much humorous invective thrown in, that the band’s bassist, Martyne, recently had defected to Perry Farrell’s new band, so Zander Schloss had to switch over from his accustomed guitar slot. Meanwhile, guitarist Mike Martt didn’t arrive until the show was almost over (Forrest joked that he wouldn’t get paid).

But that left plenty of room for guitarist Dix Denney, drummer Pete Weiss and Schloss to muster a Hendrixian noise attack, heavy on wah-wah screams and feedback groans.

When openings for humor arose, Thelonious took them. The Hop usually hosts cover bands, and one regular kept asking the band to play something he knew. Instead of getting haughty and huffy, Thelonious complied as best it could--playing Elvis Costello’s “Radio Radio,” which Forrest said is the closest thing to a hit that the band knows. When the guy asked for something by Devo, Dramarama and Oingo Boingo, Forrest mustered a humorous story about a backstage encounter he once had with Boingo’s Danny Elfman.

There was a nervous moment when the same thickset fan strode on stage and confronted the bantam-sized Forrest. But the guy, who’d evidently had a bit to drink, was more poignant than threatening before security escorted him off:

“I know I’m nobody,” he said. “It’s a sad world, so, like, rock ‘n’ roll.”

Thelonious did rock out for fun at the end, playing a thrashy Weirdos song (Denney and Schloss both also play in the Weirdos) and a snippet of John Lydon’s “Public Image.”

But while Denney and Weiss went about stowing their equipment, Forrest and Schloss sat on the stage and added an acoustic coda that was the show’s highlight. In his hurt, passionate voice, Forrest sang “My Boy” and “Anymore,” songs about the devastation that divorce and growing up without a dad can bring into a kid’s life. It was a warm, intimate moment that gave pain a personal, and therefore comprehensible, focus on a night when pain was general.

Opening band Ku De Tah played a funk-rap-metal hybrid that was a skillfully rendered but rather colorless blend of Suicidal Tendencies and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Front man Todd Beattie kept marveling that reality had caught up with the calls for insurrection and resistance against unjust authority in the band’s lyrics. He wasn’t sure what to make of that--which called to mind the adage that you’d better be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it.

Ku De Tah scored toward the end of its 45-minute set. “Season of Chaos” was the sort of half-angry, half-anguished account of ghetto life that Fishbone might deliver, and “Fifteen to One,” which has been getting airplay on MARS-FM, gave a sardonic blow-by-blow account of the Rodney King beating. Vicky Calhoun, a Fullerton resident who does backup vocals for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, stepped out of the audience to lend some soul-fired power to a concluding run through Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.”

The top-billed Dickies couldn’t make it to the show because of the Los Angeles riot. Tangent Productions, which has begun to bring occasional alternative rock concerts to the Hop, will bring the Dickies in on May 31. The Fluid will open.

Orange County has to count as a blessing any club that will book original rock, and the Hop is well suited to major shows. The sound clarity is good and the sight lines excellent in the spacious red-carpeted hall that has its tiers of seats and ceramic-topped long tables in a wide horseshoe surrounding the stage. It’s not an intimate place, but the option is there for fans who want close contact with a band to gather in front of the double-tiered low stage on a wooden dance floor marked like a basketball court, complete with hoops and backboards at either end.