POP MUSIC REVIEW : Jeffrey Gaines, Paula Cole: A Passion Play in 2 Acts

Passion is no ordinary word, to quote Graham Parker. At the Jeffrey Gaines/Paula Cole double feature at the Coach House Friday night, passion was enough to raise the level of the young East Coast singer-songwriters’ performances far above the level of their songwriting.

Gaines, 28, has two albums to his credit and Cole, 26, is a newcomer with one release. They aren’t songwriting slouches: Both offer material that is intelligent, deeply felt and melodically attractive.

But they nevertheless reflect the general slippage of songsmithing in an era when video is triumphant and text is in retreat. The result is a bluntness of expression, a rush to make an emotional point, that precludes experimentation with the sound of words, with imagery, and with methods of poetic indirection. Gaines and Cole are good enough to write songs with themes and situations and core feelings that make an impression; neither thus far has generated verses that stick in the mind.

The Bob Dylan of “My Back Pages” trusted his listeners to derive meaning from an enigmatic but evocative refrain: “But I was so much older than, I’m younger than that now.” If Gaines or Cole were to write a song with the same lyrical thrust as Dylan’s, which voiced deep reservations about the enterprise of political songwriting, they probably would give us rhyming position papers rather than Dylan’s strands of oblique verse rich in implication.

Actually, it wouldn’t hurt if each did write such a position paper and stuck to it. When it comes to social commentary, Cole and the somewhat more able Gaines are about as subtle as a paid political advertisement.

But reservations like those, based on the singers’ recorded work, were swept aside in the absorbing rush of two impassioned performances.

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Cole, who opened, was a commanding presence, looking like a sexy St. Joan in cropped dark hair and a simple, clingy, sheath-like dress.

She clearly aimed to make the grand gesture with her kinetic delivery (at times she seemed to be urging herself on as she swung her free right hand as if it were a jockey’s whip) and she backed that intention with a rich, unstinting voice, summoning Toni Childs-like muscle in her middle range and a breathy, delicate, Joni Mitchell-ish quality at the top. Her dark, plaintive songs about stunted lives became short dramas that completely swept up the audience.

Cole, who mainly just sang, was backed by a guitarist and percussionist who brought a tonal and rhythmic charge to the more aggressive songs in the 45-minute set.

“Suwannee Joe,” an unrecorded song, is a sultry, bluesy rocker. Gerry Leonard applied the grit with acoustic slide guitar bolstered by fuzztone distortion while Cole sashayed suggestively and laid on dusky embellishments with a clarinet.

She and percussionist Eric Gabow powered her feminist lament “Watch the Woman’s Hands” with intense, syncopated hand-claps; Gabow was so caught up in the performance that he looked like a transported supplicant at a charismatic Christian prayer meeting. Touches like these gave Cole far more impact live than she musters with the full-band arrangements of her album, “Harbinger.” Even “Hitler’s Brothers,” an indictment of bigotry burdened by obvious, threadbare writing, came across with persuasive thrust.

Switching to folkier modes, the Massachusetts-based Cole recalled splendid fellow-New Englander Cheryl Wheeler as she delivered the swelling melody and full-hearted, lovelorn lament of her most attractive song, “I Am So Ordinary.” With “Bethlehem,” she put her own spin on the high-school alienation theme of Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen,” resorting to a wistful tone that called to mind Shawn Colvin.

For an encore, she highlighted her taste for big-scale drama with a version of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” that featured a human beat box routine drawn from the rap lexicon, and heavy rhythmic breathing straight out of the Beatles’ “Lovely Rita.” Between songs, she was able to step out of her intense-diva persona for humorous, down-to-earth patter. Many in the small audience of about 100 probably weren’t familiar with her, but were thoroughly smitten with what they saw and heard and sent her off with two standing ovations.

Gaines, playing solo-acoustic, walked on stage with an amiable observation about his touring partner: “Paula Cole was amazing. To be honest, I don’t know where the hell I’m gonna take you from there.”

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But, far from the nervous confession of a headliner fearful of being upstaged, this was the first gambit in a winning game plan. Personable and completely at ease, the Philadelphia-based Gaines took the audience into his confidence and disarmed it simply by saying what was on his mind from moment to moment as the show progressed. His running observations on his songs, on his wandering thoughts, and on the methods and strategies of concertizing turned into one of the most engaging color commentaries heard since Dandy Don Meredith left the broadcast booth of “Monday Night Football.”

There was a touch of egocentricity in Gaines’ discourses about his life-and-times and the enterprise at hand. But it was more than offset by his emphasis on the “we”-ness of performance: It was pretty clear that he wasn’t so much trumpeting himself as trying to establish a sense of a concert-as-shared-experience between artist and listeners, in which both sides would benefit from a friendly insider’s instant analysis.

His strategy paid off in tangible ways that heightened the music. After a long opening sequence of ballads, Gaines--whose current album, “Somewhat Slightly Dazed,” tries to position him as more of a rocker than the introspective troubadour on his 1992 debut--broke into a brisk, semi-funk strum. But he soon stopped, expressing doubts whether anything that assertive could work in the solo context. Fans urged him to continue with the song, “Nursery Rhyme,” and weighed in with keep-the-beat hand claps and whooping that gave the moment just the kind of energy the much-pleased Gaines had hoped for.

He wasn’t just talk--in fact, in a time-tested solo-folkie strategy for pacing a concert, after establishing a firm connection early on with his chat, he cut back during the second half and embarked on an uninterrupted string of songs.

His singing was firm, richly grained and soulful, its hues recalling John Lennon or a huskier, deeper-voiced Elton John. This sincere, fervent cast was well-suited to songs that often address the insecurities and fears that can disrupt relationships, or stop people from pursuing their own free paths in life.

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It was telling that he encored with a passionate version of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” which explores the process of overcoming such hurdles. Gaines sang everything with impressive conviction, and the way he swayed, bent his lanky frame or jumped in place when songs hit an emotional peak gave physical evidence that he was tapping into powerful feelings, and drawing strength and pleasure from the very act of pouring them out.

Sameness was the chief obstacle in the nearly two-hour performance. Gaines’ emphatic but simply-strummed guitar accompaniments didn’t offer much variety or counterpoint to his singing, and the material fell into a repetitive range of slow and medium tempos. The melodies all were attractive, but not distinctive enough to really stick in the mind.

However, a mighty voice, unflagging commitment and uncommon willingness to treat listeners as his confidantes and confederates allowed him to put on a more involving show than some superior but less impassioned singer-songwriters could have delivered.