O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Selecter Reaches for Ska Again : After a decade apart, the band’s leaders have re-formed with 3 newcomers. The group’s Coach House show proves there’s almost nothing dated about its old stuff.

It’s audacious for any rock band that has been gone 10 years to stage a comeback. When the return is based on a legacy as thin as the Selecter’s, a comeback would seem downright presumptuous.

Led by singer Pauline Black and guitarist Neol Davies, the Selecter formed in 1979, made two albums and broke up in 1981. It was part of the British “Two Tone” movement of bands (among them Madness, the Specials and the Beat) that based their sound on a revival of ska, the sunny, light-hopping Jamaican music that was a forerunner of the more trenchant reggae beat.

Southern California audiences have been favorably disposed to Two-Tone alumni (two of them, the Special Beat and Dave Wakeling, will share a bill Oct. 11 at the Coach House), and to such ska-influenced rock bands as L.A.’s Untouchables and Orange County’s No Doubt. So it’s no accident that the Selecter, which Davies and Black re-formed last year with three new recruits, would make its recording comeback with the L.A.-based Triple X label. The album, “Out on the Streets,” is a collection of Selecter oldies culled from a concert in London last December.

Actually, it’s a pretty tasty record--and the Selecter proved at the Coach House on Thursday night that the album wasn’t just a case of a band getting lucky on an opportune night when the tapes were rolling.

The Selecter’s two early ‘80s studio albums, “Too Much Pressure” and “Celebrate the Bullet,” yielded enough good songs to carry a 70-minute show that also included a smattering of passable new material. Except for a ska-style run through the “James Bond” theme, there was nothing dated about the Selecter’s old stuff. There were songs about people struggling on the economic edge (“Everyday (Time Hard)”), people fed up with lying politicians (“Carry Go Bring Home”), people searching for a sense of direction and community (“Street Feeling,” “Out on the Streets Again”) and people buckling under too much pressure (“Too Much Pressure”). Now, none of that would be relevant in this election year, would it?

Black certainly found the election relevant, putting heavy knocks on George Bush and Ross Perot during song introductions and suggesting at one point that “what you (Americans) need is a working-class party, (so) get to it.” It was all a bit soap-boxy, and, when she declared the Selecter “the thinking-person’s ska band,” self-serving as well. Black did her most effective agitating driving home songs with the determined singing that surfaced on “Celebrate the Bullet” and “Madness.”

It helped that Black had more on her agenda than coming off as the thinking-person’s ska singer. She also was a ska singer who’d do the most exacting dance-aerobics instructor proud, as she stayed in supple and almost perpetual motion, with feet bouncing, legs scissoring and arms swinging. Imperious when the subject was politics, Black was full of mischievous glances and infectious energy when the subject switched to lighter matters.

Black isn’t a gifted singer, but she was capable enough. After some early huskiness and difficulty competing with the band, she sounded comfortable and confident during the show’s second half.

One of the Selecter’s chief strengths was its ability to select. Rather than sticking with an unrelenting sprightly ska beat, the band had the means to mix things up. Those bouncy rhythms can grow tiresome unless emulating a jumping bean for an hour nonstop is your idea of ecstasy (that actually may have been the case with some of the dancers who bobbed in a stage-side pack). The Selecter played the lighter, hopping rhythms just fine, but bassist Nick Welsh had the punch and drummer Perry Melius the stiff wallop to provide more intense rock and reggae beats.

Davies was a fine, economical guitarist, dabbing on an assortment of well-placed cries, moans and distorted, liquid-toned shivers, as well as occasional punk-rock riffing that lent the music bite. Sometimes he would play against the beat’s steady Jamaican surge with terse solos that moved in a deliberately wobbly, unsteady gait. One song, “Washed Up and Left for Dead,” featured noir -sounding organ work from former Bad Manners member Martin Stewart that, along with Davies’ off-kilter strokes, suggested furtive, mysterious doings along the lines of Elvis Costello & the Attractions’ “Watching the Detectives.”

Along with Black’s charm and energy and the band’s adeptness, it helped that some of those 12-year-old songs still sounded fresh and full of good musical ideas. “Missing Words” was a dramatic lament for a failed romance that would work today for Annie Lennox or any other pop-rock diva of the moment. The bright, affirmative “Train to Skaville” featured a horn trio (supplied by opening act Let’s Go Bowling) playing flourishes that echoed “Ring of Fire.” And the infectious “On My Radio” combined the playfulness of that early ska hit, “My Boy Lollipop,” with moments of punkish toughness and a funny nod to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in which Black trilled in a mock-operatic soprano while the boys in the band formed an answering chorus of exaggerated basso profundo.

While the Selecter’s new material wasn’t sufficiently striking to herald a brilliant future, the band’s comeback will be worthwhile if it succeeds only in helping new listeners discover the still-fresh, still-relevant pleasures of its brief past.

Second-billed Let’s Go Bowling was a crack instrumental outfit from Fresno that featured boisterous horns and assured grooves as it moved through an up-tempo ska repertoire. But unless Let’s Go Bowling can narrow the split between its considerable instrumental ability and its negligible vocal and songwriting skills, it won’t be more than an appealing party band.

The Riverside-based Skeletones also lacked strong material and adequate singing, and it wasn’t nearly as sharp a band as Let’s Go Bowling. A frat-party spirit was its best asset, but even that seemed overdone at times.