ALBUM REVIEWS : Local Boys Make Good, and Just OK, Music

Some geographical complexities to consider before we dive into today’s column of local record reviews:

First off, Liquor Giants isn’t actually a local band. Ward Dotson, who basically is the Liquor Giants, has been living in New York City for several years now. But if anybody qualifies for lifelong honorary citizenship in the Orange County rock community, it’s Dotson, former guitarist and songwriter of the estimable but overlooked Pontiac Brothers, whose achievements and disappointments we’ve chronicled at length in the past.

As it happens, Dotson and his old cronies--Matt Simon, Kurt Bauman and D.A. Valdez--are back together now for one of the Pontiacs’ occasional reunion flings, with shows tonight at Raji’s, 6160 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 469-4552, and Wednesday at Linda’s Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams St., Anaheim, (714) 533-1286.

In another geographical curiosity, Dotson honored his bi-coastal affiliations by recording half of the Liquor Giants’ album with associates from the Orange County rock scene, and half with a crew of New York players. To complete the geography lesson, the Liquor Giants album originally was picked up by an Australian label, Rubber Records, which subsequently licensed the U.S. rights to a small Seattle indie label, Lucky Records.

There’s also an important Australian connection for Peter Shambrook: namely, he grew up there before coming to Southern California in 1986. Shambrook’s local gig geography includes Margaritaville, 2332 W. Coast Highway, Newport Beach, (714) 631-8220, where he plays Wednesdays at 9 p.m. (except this week, Cinco de Mayo, when he plays at 4:30 p.m.), and Thursdays at 9 p.m. at Rockin’ Pasta, in the Guardian Center, 17041 Beach Blvd., Huntington Beach, (714) 841-7745.

Lidsville, as far as we know, is not a city or a town, but the name of a new Anaheim-Fullerton band that has issued its first single. The group plays tonight at 7:30 for a multi-act benefit concert for the homeless benefit at Chapman University’s Hutton Sports Complex in Orange.

Ratings range from * (not even on the map) to **** (worth naming a street after).

*** 1/2 Liquor Giants

“You’re Always Welcome”

Lucky Records

Ward Dotson keeps making more or less the same record over and over, and we’ll keep right on listening to it with pleasure. With the Pontiac Brothers, and now on his own, Dotson’s work always rocks with gritty authority, invariably is hummable from start to finish, and shows a master thief’s ability to case and plunder some of the richest neighborhoods from the pop-rock past. Above all, his rough-hewn music is full of heart, and suffused with boozy warmth.

The point of view on “You’re Always Welcome” doesn’t vary from most of the Pontiac Brothers songs that Dotson wrote with his old band’s singer, Matt Simon.

The protagonist is an inveterate misfit who wouldn’t know where to find the ladder of success, let alone start to climb it. All he has is a hangdog sense of humor that buffers him from mewling self-pity, and an ennobling need for rock ‘n’ roll and the sustaining fellowship that it can bring. As Dotson sums up on the concluding “My World”:

I got some friends, I got my own last name

I got a beer, I got a life that’s rather lame

But it’s my world, and welcome to it

Yes, it’s my world, now help me get through it

He’s also got, in “My World,” chorus harmonies nicked from George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” an amusing touch since Harrison himself was accused of plagiarizing the very same melody from the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine.”

Elsewhere, the Beatles, the Kinks, Rod Stewart’s Faces and Steve Marriott’s Small Faces serve as models. At times, Dotson’s singing emulates Ray Davies at his most tender and wizened.

Overall, his voice is straining but tuneful. He is given to “singin’ songs out of my range,” as he puts it in one verse, but manages to emerge from even his most awkward vocal sallies unembarrassed and with the emotional payoff that a well-placed moment of near-strangulation can yield.

If Keith Richards had had the sense to make a solo album before his voice became an utter wreck, he might have come out sounding something like Dotson does here.

Dotson’s world (and musical approach) recalls that of his more famous peer, Paul Westerberg. But Westerberg, the former Replacements leader, has painted on a larger canvass, often reaching for the big statement that can sum up the frustrations of a whole class of young ne’er-do-wells.

Dotson’s thoughts seldom range beyond his own problems and his own immediate surroundings--the barroom where he has gone to seek camaraderie in “I Wanna Get Drunk With You,” or the car seat that has become his bed after a lovers’ feud in “Just Might Cry.”

There’s a lot to be said for getting the small details right and making a big, messy, catchy-as-anything noise while doing it. Westerberg will be in great shape if he gets this much right when his own highly anticipated solo debut comes out in June.

(Lucky Records, P.O. Box 4636, Seattle, Wash. 98104)

** 1/2 Peter Shambrook “Love Unseen”

Frontline Say you could build a voice as readily as you can build a body. Say Phil Collins started going to this imaginary gymnasium of the larynx. After a hard regimen of regular sweat, and perhaps some cheating with steroids, he might come out sounding like a more muscular, penetrating version of himself.

Or he could spare himself the suffering and just hire Peter Shambrook as a stand-in. With his impressive, familiar-sounding mega-Phil voice, his tall, dark, handsome looks, and his Aussie background for a pinch of the exotic, Shambrook has the raw material for success in the Christian pop world, and beyond.

His second album for Frontline, a locally based independent Christian label, isn’t fully satisfying, but it does nothing to blunt Shambrook’s promise.

The record’s chief flaw is its occasional lapse into production cliches in such ballads as “A Season in the Year” and “Never Leave You Crying.” Also, the songwriting isn’t as fleshed-out as it might be. But given the conservative strictures of Christian pop, Shambrook shows a range and an adventurous streak that should serve him well.

He excels with such straight-ahead rockers as “I Believe in You,” which is both hard-edged and celebratory, and “Landon’s Farm,” a glimpse of an old-time tent revival that is polished but not so much as to preclude a faint taste of “Brown Sugar”-style raunch.

It would have been daring had Shambrook and his producer/co-writer, Paul Clark, explored the sexual charisma that’s implicit in the spiritual charisma the song portrays. But they back off and keep things proper.

Shambrook shows good instincts by reaching outside the establishment Christian-pop fold for his most plainly evangelical song, a cover of Van Morrison’s “Whenever God Shines His Light.” He also shows good sense by singing it in his own voice instead of trying to echo the incomparable and incomparably idiosyncratic Van the Man.

Other highlights are the soulfully sung “Watching Over You,” which recalls Peter Gabriel in its lush, rhythmic production, “Dark Side,” wherein Shambrook’s urgency recalls Steve Winwood, and “Love Unseen,” a traveling man’s plaintive parting song to his wife and child.

Within the context of upholding his spiritual ideals, Shambrook manages to cover moods ranging from celebration to longing to near-despair, rendering all of them with conviction in a rangy and powerful voice.

(Frontline Records, P.O. Box 28450, Santa Ana, Calif. 92799)

** 1/2 Lidsville “Flesh Garden” (45 r.p.m.)

Meridian Records

Lidsville serves up melodic grunge a la Pearl Jam on its debut single. The A-side seems to be a sex addict’s lament, but you never know with grunge bands, which tend not to give away too much in their oblique lyrics.

The B-side, “Black Star,” is the longer, stronger, more ambitious and more evocative track. It finds singer Doc Johnson howling in a throaty, dark-Vedder-ish voice at a black night sky that he feels has cheated him of light. It could be about the eclipse of God, or it might merely be the theatrical magnification of some more mundane disappointment.

In either case, a trenchant vocal performance and a hard-edged but detailed twin-guitar arrangement sustain the drama. Lidsville isn’t breaking any new musical ground here, but it can congratulate itself on accomplishing the primary goal of a first single release: It makes you want to hear more.

Meridian Records, 418 E. 44th Circle, Long Beach, Calif. 90807.