Isaak Serves Mix of Meaty, Cheesy

“I just don’t get Chris Isaak. To me, he’s like Velveeta wrapped in shiny aluminum foil.”

So opined a friend in the industry (the music industry, not the processed cheese spread industry) when I mentioned to her that I’d be seeing Isaak at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano this week. And even though Isaak is one of my favorite performers on Earth, I can kind of see her point.

As usual, his performance Tuesday (he also played Wednesday and finishes up tonight) was a marvelous mix of mirth and melancholy. When it comes to writing and singing sad, obsessive love songs, there is only a handful of folks in the whole history of rock who could best him (Roy Orbison, Del Shannon, Richard Thompson and a very few others come to mind).

Meanwhile, in the same performance, Isaak will reel off snippets of such schlock classics as “Delilah” and “Spinning Wheel” while affecting pompous Elvis karate moves. And his between-song patter is giddily surreal.

This contrast has disturbed some (shall we say lesser ) critics who have suggested that Isaak needs to choose between being an artist and being an entertainer. Harry Connick has had the same criticism leveled at him, and as he has pointed out, Louis Armstrong got by just fine without having to make that choice.

But, that said, there was something a mite cheesy about Isaak’s performance Tuesday. It wasn’t the plastic tiki lights he’d hung above the stage or the bevy of “party nurses” he had, as usual, pulled onstage to dance with the band during his first encore. Rather, it was the nagging feeling that, good as he is, Isaak isn’t taking his artistry quite as deep as it deserves.

See him perform if you possibly can: Compared to most of the music out there, his shows are an avalanche of emotion. It’s just that, compared to the emotional reaches where some of his own best shows have ventured, his current course can seem glib and tame.

Take his 1990 New Year’s Eve show at the Coach House where, even amid massive “party nurse” action and surf-toned versions of “Auld Lang Syne,” he introduced a bunch of new songs and sang like his life depended on it.

He’s got a voice that can shade from Elvis’ baritone to Orbison’s peaks, and his control of it is remarkable. What’s lacking, though, is a relinquishing of that control. He just doesn’t often venture into the abandon where passion and immediacy take over the controls.

There were wild moments Tuesday, such as when he was clowning with his remarkable band, Silvertone, on a medley that teetered from “California Sun” to “Goldfinger.” If he could allow similar open-ended risk to creep into his serious material, Isaak well could be one of the giants of his time.

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That major quibble aside, it was a delightful show that he and Silvertone delivered. They didn’t delve much into their early material during their 90 minutes on stage, but they did pluck the best numbers (except for the missing semi-hit “Can’t Do a Thing”) off the sometimes-lackluster “San Francisco Days” album.

These, including the title track, “Two Hearts” and “Except the New Girl,” on which guitarist Greg Arreguin did a remarkable job of reproducing the record’s hovering Tom Brumley steel guitar lines.

For the last year, Arreguin has had the unenviable job of replacing Isaak’s longtime guitarist James Calvin Wilsey, whose thoroughly distinctive echo-shimmered lines were essential to the architecture of Isaak’s musical lonely towns. Arreguin generally did a fine job Tuesday of mimicking Wilsey’s style, only revealing a less deft touch on Isaak’s breakthrough “Wicked Game.” When he could inject his own style, Arreguin proved an incisive, muscular player, able to hold up his end of the band’s fine interplay.

As ever, bassist Rowland Salley and drummer Kenney Dale Johnson asserted themselves as one of the tightest, most fiery rhythm sections around. Johnson (who also provides vocal harmonies) is practically a Texas version of Ringo, accompanying ballads perfectly and driving rockers ahead of him like cattle.

He took a number of solo breaks leading into “Wild Love,” including a quote from Mitch Mitchell’s intro to Hendrix’s “I Don’t Live Today.” After one exceptional outburst, Isaak was prompted to declare to the crowd: “And you shall be his apostles!”

The set also included an incendiary version of “Heart Shaped World,” Isaak’s splendid rave-up of “Diddley Daddy,” a surf medley, and “Vaya Con Dios,” which Johnson translated as meaning “Where’s my mini-bar?”

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The Wild Colonials, a Los Angeles band that opened, is musically ambitious but showed more promise than payoff. The largely acoustic outfit (instrumentation includes violin, cello, African talking drum and Australian digeradoo ) sounds at times like at least several hundred of 10,000 Maniacs. Scottish-born singer Angela McCluskey particularly seems to get some of her vocal Celtic-isms via the Maniacs’ Natalie Merchant.

Other than that, the sextet sounds more distinctive than most new outfits. But it has yet to make that distinctive sound matter. Each of the seven songs (from a debut album, “Fruit of Life,” due in March) seemed to last about two minutes longer than the band’s inspiration did; they were padded with neoclassical violin and cello workouts at odds with the songs’ own moods.

Mono-monikered guitarist Shark played some atmospheric vibratoed lines. He also made a fine leap off the drum riser. But, like a gymnast who falters on the dismount, he gets points taken off for landing on the singer.