POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Hatfield, Dando: Noise From Heart

Noise, anger, aggression and an emphasis on grungy physicality over verbal clarity are at a premium in rock right now, reaping both commercial gains and critical applause.

So what is an alternative rocker to do if, in this decade of noise-mongers like Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails, if said rocker has to admit that, deep down, he or she has the quiet, sensitive soul of a singer-songwriter?

Sharing a bill at Bogart’s Thursday night, Boston buddies Evan Dando (main cog in the night’s headlining trio, Lemonheads) and Juliana Hatfield tried to have it both ways. Both made credible forays into that fashionable noise and grunge, but not so much that it obscured where their true allegiances lie. Brawny as the music got at points, Hatfield’s opening set and the Lemonheads’ concluding hour both were more about exposing feelings and relating slice-of-life emotional vignettes than about making a big noise.

Hatfield, former front woman of the band Blake Babies, plunged into her new phase as a solo act by severing all musical ties to her old band. Instead of the bass she played in Blake Babies, she strapped on an electric guitar to front her new trio. And, despite occasional audience calls for oldies, Hatfield filled her 45-minute set with songs from her engaging debut solo album, “Hey Babe,” tossing in four as-yet unrecorded numbers rather than rounding out the show with Blake Babies material.

Hatfield may be the least-likely grunge rocker on Earth. No shrieker like the rowdies in the all-female punk-garage band, L7, she is a reserved, waif-like woman with a small, piping little girl’s voice. In most of her songs, Hatfield set off her feathery vocals with heavy, pounding garage-rock instrumental passages. That took some of the pure-pop breeziness out of her songs and made it less appropriate to conceive of her as some better, underground version of Sussana Hoffs in which the pop hooks stay, but the slickness and seductive glamour you get from the ex-Bangle are excised.

Hatfield and her rhythm section churned respectably, but the lineup lacked an assertive and adventurous lead guitarist. Hatfield, who was solid enough as a rhythm guitarist, still seemed to be operating with a learner’s permit in the Neil Young school of crunchy solo-guitar simplicity. If she can swing the extra salary, it might be easier for her just to hire the sort of capable outside lead guitar help she got on “Hey Babe.”

The noise Hatfield made with her guitar and her band wasn’t nearly as telling emotionally as the way in which she deliberately distorted her sweet child’s voice and made it flatten, fray and crack. Hatfield may have learned a few lessons in that regard from fellow New Englanders Tanya Donelly and Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses, but her singing style is clearly her own.

That fraying-the-lily approach worked in song after song as the perfect way to convey Hatfield’s songs about unrequited crushes and impossible obsessions. She would generate the girlish swoon of puppy love, but then the airiness would deflate and throaty cracks would appear, signaling that romantic obsession is a dangerous, painful pastime.

On her slow, darkly meditative song, “The Lights,” Hatfield envisioned herself awaiting a lover’s nocturnal visit. Her stretching, crumbling voice belied the lyric’s assertion that “this might just be the best time of my life.” It wasn’t all gloom, though. She ended her set with “Nirvana,” a fan letter to the hit band, but also a psychological study in which Hatfield seizes the energy and release in a favorite song as if it were a buoy keeping her afloat in a sea of personal problems.

She encored, like a true singer-songwriter, with a confessional song done alone. The number, “Ugly,” was a self-revealing declaration of complete inadequacy that was hardly congruent with the outer, objective Hatfield’s good looks and obvious artistic worth (far from ugly, Hatfield could be quite the pop-enchantress if she wanted to sell herself as such. But her unglamorous front of jeans, T-shirt and brown, page-boy bangs is more in keeping with the plain honesty of her music). As Hatfield pronounced herself “ugly, with a capital U,” it made you wish that some gallant would step up and serenade this fetching rocker with Lou Reed’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” a comforting and reassuring song that, while 25 years old, could have been written just for that moment.

The Lemonheads opened and closed their hourlong set with ritual bursts of noise and punctuated it with a couple of gritty, distorted guitar solos from leader Dando, who played the show in a threadbare purple nightshirt with a serape-like orange and black pattern on its front. The goofy stage wear belied the music’s mostly earnest bent, as Dando alternated wistful songs about lost loves and directionless post-adolescent ennui with depictions of the enlivening burst that a new love can bring.

With his nasal-chesty voice, Dando sounded at times like Elvis Costello (one of those songs about an enlivening new love was “Alison’s Starting to Happen,” which would make an interesting bookend to Costello’s ballad, “Alison,” about the agony of a love that has long since ceased to happen). Dando shied away from the high drama and overt passion that Costello typically infuses into a song, but the feelings came through in a more modest, measured way.

Even without recourse to the big gesture, the solid songwriting and appealing pop melodies of the better Lemonheads material ensured that emotional points got across. It wouldn’t hurt, though, if Dando developed his actorly instincts in putting across a song. It might help make songs that are good enough into something truly vivid. Rough-hewn riffing from Dando and drummer David Ryan’s forward thrust on drums made everything rock quite acceptably, although the set fell into sameness during a couple of less distinguished songs that clipped along like run-of-the-mill melodic college radio fodder.

Most of the time Dando kept things interesting by juxtaposing themes and moods. If he drifted into dead-end anomie in “Rudderless,” he would rebound with “Rockin’ Stroll,” a bright ode to the promise and adventure of childhood.

Some offbeat song choices worked well. One was a fervent cover of “Frank Mills,” a love ballad from the musical “Hair” that Dando croaked sweetly, with pointed indifference to sex adjustment (in “Hair,” the song follows a girl-loves-boy scenario; Dando sang it as written). He also offered a surprisingly sensitive solo encore reading of the Misfits’ horror-steeped punk song, “Skulls.”

Lemonheads finished with a grungy version of Suzanne Vega’s “Luka” that completely changed the song’s thrust without changing a word. The original is a poignant monologue sung by an abused child. In one of his most charged and ironic vocals, Dando played the song’s protagonist as a booze-sodden grown-up sorrowing self-piteously over how adult life has beaten him down.

One element missing from the show was effective harmony support for Dando--which Hatfield supplied nicely in her moonlighting stint as the Lemonheads’ bassist and backup singer on the band’s current album, “It’s a Shame About Ray.” But she didn’t sit in this time, and Dando, who looked like he was having a good time but said little as the band hurtled from song to song, said nothing about her obvious absence on songs like the jaunty “Bit Part” and “Kitchen,” with its sprightly appropriation of the “ba-ba-pa-ooh” harmony riff from Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.”

Dando and bassist Nic Dalton traded grins over Dalton’s overmatched attempts to take her place, but offered no explanation (according to the Lemonheads’ sound man, Hatfield has sung backups during the tour, but at Bogart’s she left after playing her own set).