POP MUSIC REVIEW : After a Few Songs, His Set Gets Tangled Up in Belew

A freight train plummeting through outer space? No, that’s just the sound of Adrian Belew saying hello with his guitar at the Coach House on Thursday night.

As he has since Frank Zappa plucked him out of a Holiday Inn lounge band in the 1970s--since gracing music by Talking Heads, King Crimson, Nine Inch Nails and oodles of others, not to mention his own prolific, if lonely, solo career--Belew on Thursday took his guitar to sonic realms few others bother to essay.

Even back when he was equipped with the same effects most other guitarists were using, Belew had been able to draw a jaw-dropping range of tones from his guitar, including trumpeting elephants, sci-fi shrieks, and thickly layered Jovian atmospheres of sound.

For the past few years he’s also been making an incredibly nimble use of the Roland guitar synthesizer, and there’s now seemingly no limit to the voices available to him.

He’s an inventive player, avoiding the standard-riff boxes most guitarists fall into. Rather, his phrasing often seems to emulate animal speech, and his melodies don’t want for exoticism.

Yet, even though Belew was backed by an trio of excellent players, his music became a bit wearying over the course of the 18-song set. That can be blamed, in part, on the fact that his was the last set of a four-act bill, which makes for a long weeknight. But there were other more central problems.

The first is that Belew writes a good song from time to time, but as often as not he comes up with ones that just don’t connect emotionally or melodically: If a listener can’t feel a song, it would nice to at least be able to hum it.

The remaining problem is that for all the incredible range of tones Belew employs, those sounds are limited in depth. Whether employing the synthesizer or not, nearly everything he played was heavily processed through loads of electronic gear. There was naught to be seen of this gear onstage except two speakers and a pedal-board, but that board was linked to an offstage rack packed with gizmos.

Possessing romantic names like GZ700-3AB-ZZZOX, these gadgets represent rack-mount manna for techno-minded, progressive-rock tweak-heads, who would probably queue up for a three-hour film titled “Adrian’s Rig.”

Yet even in the hands of Belew, who gets some of the most human applications out of all this gear of anyone extant, the equipment forces a trade-off: It may offer him an infinitely greater variety of sounds, but, at least at the present state of the art, those processed sounds lack the expressiveness of even the cheapest unaffected guitar.

As a result, his multi-timbral performance was a bit like being on a tour that whisked you through every country on the globe but never stopped to let you partake of the cultures in any depth.

A potential solution to the first problem--the songs--was close at hand Thursday. Backing Belew onstage, and preceding him with a set of their own, were his old band mates and writing partners from the Bears, his delightful group of the late ‘80s. They now perform under the name Psychodots. Guitarist Rob Fetters, bassist Bob Nyswonger and drummer Chris Arduser are all monster players, well able to keep pace with Belew’s adventurous musical romps.

Perhaps Belew should collaborate with them offstage again, as Nyswonger and Fetters also are fine writers, who clearly brought out the best in Belew in their Bears days. Their two albums on the defunct Primitive Man label were full of delightful songs that clearly used the invention and melodicism of the Beatles’ “Revolver” album as a standard to which to aspire.

The handful of Bears-era songs Belew used in Thursday’s show, including “Superboy” and “Rabbit Manor,” were among the high points, particularly the irresistible “Trust” that closed the show.

The rest of the material ranged from the romantic “Heartbeat” and other numbers from Belew’s stint with King Crimson in the early ‘80s to selections from his current solo album, “Here.” (Belew, incidentally, promised the audience that a re-formed Crimson would have a new album out by next spring, with a tour to follow.)

For several years he’s been writing and recording solo, and like others doing the one-man-band route, the result has sometimes seemed sterile. Some of the songs gained an added life when performed live by a band.

A particular standout from the new album was “Burned by the Fire We Make,” a passionate and catchy ecology song.

The Psychodots preceded him with a brief set, “The shortest we’ve played since we were in high school together,” said Fetters. Though brief, it was rich in melody and harmony and was musically playful. Fetters even inflated a balloon while soloing and then used it to fret his strings with, to a surprisingly musical effect.

According to the Coach House folks, it was a fluke that the show had three opening acts. Whatever the reason--and even with other mini-disasters like a restroom flood--the club did an exemplary job of keeping things moving, turning a potential debit into a bonus.

Huddled on one corner of the stage, the L.A. sextet Wild Colonials offered a fully acoustic version of their typically semi-acoustic set. With Scottish-born singer Angela McCluskey drawing from the same Sandy Denny-derived Celtic influence as Natalie Merchant, it’s not entirely inaccurate to dub the band 10,001 Maniacs.

Though the set included only five songs, it showcased both the band’s strengths and its weaknesses.

The former includes McCluskey’s rich voice and an adventurous musical spirit that incorporates cello, violin, talking drum and Australian didgeridoo without seeming gimmicky.

The band’s shortcomings derive largely from a lack of self-editing. Songs that might have worked at three minutes started seeming light on lyrical depth and musical drama when stretched out long past that length with repeated verses and choruses. Still, this is a band with a healthy dollop of potential.

The same is true of opening act the Heads of State, which has improved greatly since a Coach House debut a year ago, and that show had been pretty good to begin with.

The San Diego/O.C.-roaming band has gone through a name change--it was called Rod & the Pistons--and local music fans might recall bassist John Frias’ fine previous band the Wild Cards.

He and his sibling singer-guitarists Rod and Darryl Frias, along with drummer Dan Gonzales, play a muscular yet melodic brand of blues rock, bolstered by Rod’s passionate vocals and guitar work that is fiery, if still slightly cluttered. The group appears tonight at Cafe Calypso in San Clemente.