POP MUSIC REVIEW : Roxy Demand for Big Head Todd

Maybe there’s a growing grudge against grunge, but--judging from the enthusiastic response to the Colorado trio Big Head Todd & the Monsters at the Roxy on Friday--there’s a new demand for young bands that play “tasty” music and value “chops” highly, for better or worse.

BHT, for six years a Rocky Mountain favorite that will release its first major-label album next month, has apparently studied Dire Straits, Eric Clapton and the Police with the same intensity that the grungers have schooled themselves in Sabbath and Zeppelin.

Singer-guitarist Todd Park Mohr is obviously a talented crowd-pleaser, and bassist Rob Squires and drummer Brian Nevins are solid players, though hardly monsters. But nearly every song carried distracting reminders of at least one of those role models.

Friday it seemed particularly as if Mohr has spent way too much time with the Mark Knopfler guitar book. More than one “Sultans of Swing” lick snuck into his extended solos. The problem is that he doesn’t, well, swing, and his mid-song instrumental workouts tended to lose steam and dissolve into neck-strangling flurries with little emotional or musical content. And tasty tunes without that are like grunge without flannel.