POP MUSIC REVIEW : Naked Soul Reveals an Intriguing Potential : Despite a few problems, the band delivers forceful songs, hinting that it’s capable of something special.

An ideal Naked Soul concert would be a draining but cathartic experience, a clenched drama that fully involved an audience in the struggle against isolation and rejection that goes on in leader Mike Conley’s songs.

The Costa Mesa band’s short, casual bow Thursday night at Our House was far from ideal, but enough good things happened to suggest that Naked Soul’s recently revamped and expanded lineup is capable of delivering something approaching a peak performance.

Playing a hometown show in homey surroundings, Conley was affable and loose and not particularly concerned with involving the half-full house in psychodrama. That’s not to say that the performances lacked power or resonance. While the lyrics may be about grappling with torments, Conley’s best songs have a soaring quality that conveys yearning for better things.

Also, the sheer force of the music carries the feeling of liberation and momentary relief that rock was designed to bring. At times, Naked Soul brought just that.

In the past, Conley has been an inconsistent performer. Catch Naked Soul on the wrong night, and he could be unfocused on stage. He’d jerk away from the microphone, leaving words inaudible or unsung. He’d spend inordinate amounts of time with his back to the audience as he hunkered close to his guitar amplifier, coaxing out waves of feedback.

The similarities between his style and Paul Westerberg’s have been noted frequently, and the parallel sometimes extended to bouts of onstage moodiness.

But judging by this show, Conley is now a happy fellow--happy enough to jump and spin in an exuberant response to his band’s hefty sound.

The addition of a second guitar to complement his own was a good move: Bill Latas’ glancing licks combined with Conley’s slashing sallies to give Naked Soul a thick, hard presence.

The new drummer, Shawn Poores (like Latas, a relatively recent transplant from Kansas City), was a stout fellow who kept the beat simple and went red in the face with his effective labors to make it crudely emphatic. The two new men also were capable backing singers. Rounding out the band is a new bassist, Alec Porter.

The inconsistencies in this show were more a matter of faulty design than erratic performance. At 37 minutes, the set was at least four or five songs short of a full load.

After a good start with “Dizzy,” it bogged down with two undistinguished numbers from Naked Soul’s 1992 debut EP, “Seed.” That EP was indeed a gestation period for the band, because Conley’s songwriting flowered on the strong 1993 album, “Visiting Your Planet.”

Another mistake was the mid-set summoning of Fluf’s guitarist, O, for a cover of “Try,” a crude, Seeds-style ‘60s-throwback culled from the contemporary band Overwhelming Colorfast.

It was a pal-like thing to do, but it stalled the set. Better to have saved the sloppy fun between buddies for the encore.

Compensating for those flaws were good, storming versions of the irate “You, Me and Jack Kerouac” and the anguished “Helicopter Man,” plus a well-wrought elegy in “Wishing Again” and a propulsive Who anthem, “So Sad About Us.”

Conley may have gotten his start in an ‘80s punk band called MIA, but that was no excuse for letting the coursing rocker “If It’s Cool With You” and the fine, dejected ballad “Visiting Your Planet” remain missing from this set’s action.

Most of the pieces are there for Naked Soul to shoot for something special in its concerts, but that will take a more ambitious approach in which those pieces are assembled into a cohesive, emotionally grabbing whole.

An interesting story in last week’s Billboard magazine notes how Beatles-inspired bands keep coming in waves, even though the ‘80s and ‘90s have not been kind commercially to Beatlesque rockers. Think of Crowded House, Redd Kross, 3D Picnic, XTC and Squeeze, all of whom put a premium on melody, harmony and song craft, and none of whom has become a hot seller like many in the grunge field.

Add Permanent Green Light to the ranks of capable, highly skilled bands hoping that the masses will become as receptive to the charms of pure pop as they are to the latest sludgy rehash of Black Sabbath.

The Los Angeles trio’s harmonizing singers, Matt Devine and Michael Quercio (formerly of The Three O’ Clock, an ‘80s psychedelic-revival band), worked the upper registers with the songs anchored and rocking--Devine with stinging, well-shaped guitar leads, Quercio with active, McCartney-style melodic bass lines, and drummer Chris Bruckner with pinpoint guidance through the songs’ episodic structures.

Like Dada, another L.A. trio that’s a promising contender in the neo-Beatles mold, PGL had the ability to stretch out instrumentally--witness the regal coda to “Something on Me,” and a concluding workout that tossed in sections of Pete Townshend’s “Overture” (or was it the “Underture”?) from “Tommy.”

Virtually everything was engaging while it was being played. The problem is that the songs, most of them culled from the band’s current album, “Against Nature,” don’t have the stick-in-the-mind quality of the best pure pop, which ought to keep you humming for weeks.

The Incredible Circus Train, a trio from Hacienda Heights, opened with a set of rough-hewn but pop-conscious rock akin to the Lemonheads. It was a tad too sloppy at times, and Karl Rumpf’s singing needs more presence and vigor. But there was some spark there, too, and a heartfelt tug in wistful songs about first loves and first heartaches.