POP MUSIC REVIEW : Firehose: Easy to Admire, If Hard to Like

San Pedro’s Firehose--and its previous incarnation as the Minutemen--is conceivably the father of the “alternative” movement in rock ‘n’ roll, cranking to the converted for almost 13 years. The trio’s crisp, polyrhythmic drumming, busy, post-punk funk bass and nest-of-bees guitar have provided almost a template for intelligent college rock.

At the Whisky on Thursday, Firehose played its first show in a while before a hometown crowd, and even that Hollywood-jaded audience seemed impressed. Firehose these days seems almost less about what it has done than about what it hasn’t: developed an easy grunge veneer, gone metal, adopted the facile pop structures it always seems to skirt.

If anything, the newer songs leaned toward the less accessible years of X and brutal tropical heat. Mike Watt’s complicated bass lines almost approached calypso, but not the fun kind. Firehose is an easy band to admire, but not an easy band to like.

Firehose is very good at what it does, clean and strong and almost without mistakes, highly deconstructed, polished and rehearsed, but its music is ultimately rock ‘n’ roll about the dailyness of rock ‘n’ roll, more admirable as an artifact than as a band to knock your head against the side of the stage to.