O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Shriekback Kicks Back at Rhythm Cafe

If imperialism could be practiced in music as it has been in geopolitics, Shriekback might have powered its way to a completely dominant performance at the Rhythm Cafe Saturday when it headlined something called the “World Domination Tour.”

Instead, the veteran English dance-rock band settled for qualified success.

Back in action after a four-year layoff, Shriekback is on the road with Low Pop Suicide and Sky Cries Mary, bands signed to the World Domination label co-owned by Shriekback’s bassist, Dave Allen. Had it granted itself the true imperialist’s charter to pillage, Shriekback might have been tempted to ransack the talent of Low Pop Suicide’s impressive howler, Rick Boston, who had the presence and clout that Shriekback’s own Barry Andrews lacked.

Or, to provide better backups for Andrews, it might have coerced Sky Cries Mary to hand over its strong tandem of darkly romantic singers, whose unison harmony may not make anybody forget Grace Slick and Marty Balin, but still strongly suggested the Summer of Love.

In Shriekback’s previous incarnation, two harmonizing sisters, Wendy and Sarah Partridge, bolstered Andrews’ leads. In the new lineup, most of the backups fell to one singer, Kat Evans, who played sharp keyboards and some wild electric violin, but vocals weren’t her forte.

That left Andrews pretty much on his own with his low, guttural voice. Like a lot of English singers emboldened by punk’s anyone-can-do-it ethos, Andrews sounds like a guy with a bad chest cold who has been told that constant gargling might help.

What Andrews does have is a gawky, scampering energy, arresting, shaven-head looks (what works for Telly Sevalas, Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett and Sinead O’Connor works for Shriekback, too) and a slightly barbed but quite likable stage personality. Before the show was three minutes old, Andrews was roaming Rhythm Cafe’s tiers of tables, hurdling railings, and summoning most of the audience to the stage-front dance floor.

“Eating food and watching rock music are two mutually exclusive options, very bad for your digestion,” Andrews said in a tone more coaxing than reproachful. “We heartily invite you to leave the cozy tables and come down into the pit where everything gets sweaty and interesting.”

A while later, Andrews had to eat his own words. After a too-placid stretch of songs from Shriekback’s new album, “Sacred City,” he had to admit, “This is reasonably digestive music, isn’t it? Perhaps I was a little harsh.”

In fact, “Sacred City” is a worthwhile album to chew on. Shriekback has always been about ideas as well as dance beats, and its ruminations on “Sacred City” touch on archeology, anthropology, communication theory, the rise of civilizations--little things like that (Shriekback traces its cerebral roots to XTC and Robert Fripp’s League of Gentlemen, Andrews’ previous bands, and the politicized punk band Gang of Four, which Allen co-founded before launching Shriekback with Andrews in 1982).

But most of the new album’s songs have a restrained, night-time mood, and aren’t supremely catchy or readily danceable. Stringing together five selections from “Sacred City” didn’t work in concert; they weren’t the sort of extroverted, big-hook songs that register instantly on stage, and Andrews didn’t have the vocal power to bring the lyrics to the forefront.

Shriekback (Evans and guitarist Mike Cozzi supported the three core members, Andrews, Allen and drummer Martyn Barker) did offer delicate, shimmering, detailed playing on “Hymn to the Local Gods.” And “Faded Flowers,” a quietly lamenting Shriekback oldie, turned Andrews’ scratchy singing into a strength. Smoothly crooned, its sad declarations would sound saccharine and slick. Backed only by Barker’s light tap dance on a drum rim and Evans’ gauze-like keyboard textures, Andrews’ diminished voice helped him bring home the sense of loss in the song.

Shriekback was more in its element in a dance-oriented second half.

“Feelers” boiled with a constantly building intensity, thanks to Allen’s constantly prodding bass and Andrews’ nervous blasts and blips on keyboards; Shriekback achieved some of the funky tension of Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime.” That intensity surfaced again during “Lined Up.” Versatile, if not exactly a one-of-a-kind original among dance-rock bands, Shriekback offered Oingo Boingo-like frenzy via the country-beat stomp “Go Bang,” and a regal, anthem sound a la Simple Minds with the show-closing “Intoxication.”

By the end, Andrews was wincing from a twinge of heartburn and affirming that Shriekback wasn’t an after-dinner band, after all: “The thing about this place, the food is excellent and they give you a lot of it, but in the course of jumping around you find yourself being reacquainted with your dinner,” he mused. The more its playing simmered, the better Shriekback tasted.

Quiet interludes didn’t figure in Low Pop Suicide’s performance, unless you count an aggressive folk-rock solo introduction played by Rick Boston, the band’s bare-chested, scruffy-bearded singer-guitarist. Other than that, Boston and his two sidekicks, Dave Allen (pulling double bass duty on this tour) and drummer Jeff Ward, stormed and slashed through a half-hour of noisy, free-wailing garage rock hardly muffled by the red-lettered sign (“Fear Your Own God”) that covered the bank of Marshall amps behind Allen.

There was a touch of Ministry-style slamming brutality in Low Pop’s beats (Ward is a former Ministry sideman). But a closer likeness might be John Cale’s late-’70s “Sabotage Live” album, in which the punk-rock godfather and a band of players far less capable than Low Pop Suicide responded to the punk movement with music that was dark and hammering, but tuneful.

Boston howled with Cale-like baleful theatricality as he sang about love gone rotten, but he managed to ground material in melody as much as aggression. Amplifying the mood were rapidly flashing images on a video screen behind the band, including a rush of colors that recalled the hurtling-toward-Jupiter sequence of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which Low Pop Suicide deployed during the set’s high point, a headlong, surf-rock-goes-to-outer-space number called “Crush.”

Sky Cries Mary hails from Seattle but has nothing to do with the “Seattle Sound” of Nirvana, Soundgarden et al. The six-member band does have everything to do with the San Francisco sound, circa 1967. It played a dark, languid, mystical pipe-dream of a set; its obvious aim was mind-alteration by musical means.

To that end, Sky Cries Mary employed a ‘60s-style liquid light show, its bubbling backdrop images growing more intense--in keeping with the music--as the show went on. The band looked the part, too: huge, floppy stovepipe hat on one member, multicolored duds that Brian Jones might have admired on another, and for singer Anisa Romero, a Gypsy fortuneteller look with long dress and half-moon pendant.

While the look and sound were a quarter-century old, the band’s methods were modern, with two synthesizers and an effects-laden guitar setting down a wash of sound atop hypnotic beats embellished by the occasional use of murky movie sound-bites and rap-influenced turntable scratching. But the result was strictly old-line psychedelia, a swirling bed of instrumental sound in which Romero and co-singer Roderick could dream away in sighing unison.

The band was best when assertive dynamics and rhythms gave shape to the songs. The highlights were a roiling, mysterious, Celtic-flavored traditional folk ballad, “Back to the Sea,” and a spacey cover of the Rolling Stones’ “2,000 Light Years From Home.”