POP MUSIC REVIEW : Coach House Rocks With Roots of Femmes-inism

With forward career motion reportedly stalled for the moment because of legal wrangling over the band’s record contract, Violent Femmes devoted its show Wednesday night at the Coach House to looking back.

Nine years back, to be exact. The trio from Milwaukee keyed its nearly two-hour concert around its 1983 debut release, “Violent Femmes,” playing eight of that popular album’s 10 songs. That was just fine by a full house that received everything enthusiastically but took special joy in songwriter Gordon Gano’s earliest expressions of the frustration-unto-madness that has been his most persistent theme.

The Femmes didn’t ignore their most recent work, playing five songs from the solid, roots-rock oriented 1991 release, “Why Do Birds Sing?” But singer-guitarist Gano, drummer Victor DeLorenzo and bassist Brian Ritchie, whose lot the past few months has been opening shows for the B-52’s (a function they’ll perform again Saturday night at Irvine Meadows), clearly enjoyed this detour away from big venues. It afforded the group a chance to stretch out with a career retrospective in front of an audience sufficiently steeped in Femmes-inism to sing along on many a catchy, catch-phrase chorus.

The Femmes didn’t go for exact replication of their early work. Back then, they were an almost all-acoustic enterprise. This time, Gano wielded a red Rickenbacker electric guitar for the entire concert, and used it to noisy effect. Gano was a fairly rudimentary guitarist who sometimes almost disappeared instrumentally amid the activist clatter of DeLorenzo and the assured thumping of Ritchie, who rumbled through multiple crowd-pleasing solos on his amplified acoustic bass guitar. The Femmes’ sound gets awfully repetitious when the guitar isn’t adding anything interesting--so Gano’s more assertive instrumental contributions, no matter how basic, always helped a great deal.

It also helped that the Femmes covered many stylistic bases: the Velvet Underground balladry of “Good Feeling,” a whole lotta ‘50s-style shaking during “Girl Trouble,” a jazzy, beat-generation mood on “Gone Baby Gone” (highlighted by Ritchie’s dry-bones xylophone), some surprisingly heavy-rocking renditions of oldies like “Never Tell,” and even a bit of surf rock during the profane novelty song that ended the show.

The tiny Gano looked like a stubbly choirboy as he fronted the band (he joked that he decided he could get away with not shaving because this was a “mature audience”). At the end of the show, while the Femmes were soaking up avid applause, DeLorenzo scolded the singer for messing around with his minimalist drum kit. It made one wonder whether Gano, who looks like somebody’s kid brother, has to put up with being treated like one in his own band.

The characters in Gano’s songs certainly know what it is to endure slights, and much worse. Populating many pages of his songbook are people who crack under the strain of loneliness, rejection and, most dangerous of all, unfulfilled sexual need. But the Femmes never let any of this become dreary. In fact, the 1991-vintage song, “Out the Window,” brought an oddly cheerful bounce and bright Afro-Caribbean harmonies to an account of folks who find themselves responding to some unfathomable, lemming-like instinct to pitch themselves over the brink.

But as he emphasized humor early in the set, it took a while for Gano to get in the mood to portray warped characters with more bite. Despite being bathed in diabolical red light, he didn’t muster a very convincing portrayal of the killer in “Country Death Song.”

This first-person account of a rural father who pushes his daughter down a well sounded more than ever like a pallid recasting of Bob Dylan’s truly chilling “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” The next song was the country-gospel declaration of faith, “Jesus Walking on the Water,” but the Femmes hadn’t dug deeply enough into despair at that point to make the song’s uplift really resonate.

By the end, Gano had gotten into the mood with vehement renditions of the debut-album psychodramas “Never Tell,” “Confessions,” “Gone Baby Gone,” “Add it Up” and “Kiss Off,” which dominated the show’s home stretch. The band rocked noisily but never sloppily, and Gano used his nasal wail to delve into the songs’ characters. (John Cale and David Byrne are better at playing protagonists of questionable sanity and emotional equilibrium, but the Femmes’ singer still rates highly on that count.)

While playing with a sense of fun, Violent Femmes drove home that these songs were the cries of cracked hearts, tormented minds and miserable souls. Sometimes, even woe can be a source of delight.