POP MUSIC REVIEW : Lighting a Fuse to ‘Burning Questions’ : Graham Parker Pays Dim Homage to Albums Chronologically, Then Bursts Into Current Material

“We’ve got some chronology going on tonight,” Graham Parker noted five songs into his show Sunday at the Coach House. For fans with the requisite knowledge and a passion for such trivia, it already was clear that the British singer was charting a straight line through his career via one song from each album.

It seemed an arbitrary way to structure a show, made more so as the show unfolded by his insistence on avoiding artistic highlights such as “Howlin’ Wind,” “Don’t Ask Me Questions,” “You Can’t Be Too Strong” and “Under the Mask of Happiness.” Instead he put up several C-team songs on the order of 1980’s “Empty Lives” and 1985’s “Canned Laughter.”

But, while it wasn’t entirely the Parker show made in heaven, a couple of factors made the performance--the first of a new U.S. tour--a success. First, his dogged chronology led him through his mid-’80s albums, allowing him to reveal some real gems from a period generally dismissed these days as Parker’s artistic beauty rest.

But the best thing about his protracted history lesson was that he capped it with a no-looking-back 10-song chunk of his current “Burning Questions” album. Upon repeated listenings, that disc may be stacking up as one of the strongest albums of this year, and Parker sang its songs with such passion that no one in the audience seemed to mind that he wasn’t driving the show home with his familiar demi-hits.

In the mid-’70s, Parker rode in on the wave of British discontent that also brought the punk movement to these shores. Instead of punk’s amusical rebellion, Parker instead kicked London pub rock--down-scaled, tuneful R & B-based music--into a higher gear with his vitriolic lyrics and gritty vocals.

These days, Parker’s hair has gone peppery--making him look a bit like a rockin’ Ralph Nader--and, if anything, his passion for bitter, incisive commentaries has only increased. But while Parker’s own soul once seemed as impenetrable as the perennial sunglasses resting on his nose, an equal number of his songs now turn inward, exploring the interior barriers that can shield one against trust and love and the redemption found in surmounting those barriers.

Parker and his new quartet, the Small Clubs, opened with a pair of songs from 1976, “Nothin’s Gonna Pull Us Apart” and “Back Door Love,” which served as reminders of the vitality and promise of his early music. His band--bassist Graham Maby (late of Joe Jackson’s group), drummer Gary Burke, keyboardist Joel Diamond and guitarist Jamie Hoover--played with a cohesive sound that usually underscored Parker’s moods.

The standouts among the older songs were “Dark Side of the Bright Lights”--which can be read to be about a corrosive relationship or either side of the artist/audience relationship--and “Anniversary” from 1983’s “The Real Macaw” album. It presages the tenderness he only now seems comfortable with, celebrating a couple’s first anniversary:

This is our first year

No one else but us here

And even with the darkness all around us

We look into each other’s eyes and understand

Why true love is in such demand His renaissance began with 1988’s “The Mona Lisa’s Sister” album, and the most effective Parker show might eschew the older material and start there. As it was, that milestone album was represented only by “I Don’t Know,” perhaps its weakest cut. The subsequent “Human Soul” and “Struck By Lightning” albums also received much less than their due.

Even in performing nearly all of “Burning Questions” Parker omitted what might have been its most timely and powerful live song, “Here It Comes Again,” a blast at the abrogation of individual freedoms being promulgated by the “moral” right.

There was no shortage of topical commentary in “Short Memories.” Parker spat out its lines about kids being sent off to an endless procession of wars:

Some came home their pants in creases

Some came home in bits and pieces

The President made a lot of speeches

Then went fishing for the day Most of his newer songs were instead concerned with the battles of the heart: the desperation of a couple trying to put bitterness behind them in “Yesterday’s Cloud,” someone overwhelmed by love’s challenges in “Worthy of Your Love” and the naked confession of a closed-up person struggling to show his feelings in “Mr. Tender” and “Oasis.”

Such songs don’t appear to come easy to Parker, but they seemed the emotional core of his performance. His grainy voice cracked with feeling, as the latter song’s lyric rose to a tentative pledge: “In the desert that passes for my heart / Sweet rain is falling tonight . . . Be my oasis and I’ll try not to be your mirage.”

On such songs, his new band showed a seasoned empathy. There were other occasions, though, when they and Parker would try to pump a drama into some songs that simply wasn’t there. On “Empty Lives,” for example, there was an extended vamp spiced with staccato bursts from the drums, which begged for some emotional input from Parker that wasn’t forthcoming.

Hoover’s busy guitar work was the main coloring agent in most songs, which he tended to wash with a ‘60s Brit pop-rock tone and sensibility. While the jangly guitar work had drive and flair, Parker’s voice often might have been better served by the lyricism guitarist Gurf Morlix showed in Lucinda Williams’ opening set.

Louisiana-raised singer/songwriter Williams had an excellent band in Morlix--who gave her music a bit of the fire and moonlight Ry Cooder brings to John Hiatt’s songs--bassist Rowlie Salley (on loan from Chris Isaak’s band) and drummer Donald Lindley. At times they far outdistanced what Williams herself brought to her songs.

For much of her set, her voice seemed pointedly disengaged from what she was singing, which made for some rough sledding when combined with the drab repetition of some of her choruses. That was enough to skewer “He Never Got Enough Love,” a fairly rote examination of how a guy winds up on death row.

It doesn’t take much more effort from Williams to create a rare magic. When she pairs her distinctive Southern quaver with some feeling and a song that warrants it, she and her band make a singular and powerful sound on driven rockers such as “Lines Around Your Eyes.”

Her melodic “Six Blocks Away” sounded like Hiatt’s “Bring the Family” band might if tackling a Hollies song, while “Hot Blood” was a shimmering, slinky thing, with Williams’ sultry vocal and Morlix’s Sears, Roebuck guitar (played with a beer bottle) coiled around each other like snakes.