Pop Music Review : To Femmes, Wry and Wherefore Come Naturally

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO — Is rock still allowed to be desperate but not serious?

With Hole, Nine Inch Nails, Soundgarden and other ultra-sincere icons mining rage and pain from the depths of their souls, I-really-mean-it-man seems to have become the watchword of the moment.

Violent Femmes and their singer-songwriter Gordon Gano have reaped greater rewards than most from teen Angst . “Violent Femmes,” the 1983 debut album by the band from Milwaukee, has become a slow-building classic, selling well more than 1 million copies on the strength of its anthems of adolescent rage and frustration.

But even the 19-year-old who first recorded those songs kept a sense of ironic distance from his desperation. Gano’s exaggerated, comical whine of a wise guy’s voice and his wry lyrical touches put a cushioning spin on his darkest declarations.

Even if his characters’ frustration and anger are truly felt, the songs’ degree of detachment makes their threats of vengeance (“I’m gonna hack, hack, hack, hack it apart”) and suicide (“the day is in my sight when I’ll take a bow and say good night”) seem more like steam-venting and self-dramatization than blueprints for action. By toying with neuroses, the Femmes avoid holding them unhealthily close to the bosom.

Some 13 years later, Violent Femmes don’t seem at all burdened by the issues of authenticity that consume some of their younger peers. Now that they’re in their 30s, they don’t have to ask whether they still really-mean-it-man. That never was an issue: The humor in the band’s approach always gave it a sane escape hatch from the insanity it sang about.

Consequently, the Femmes can do shows like the one they did Tuesday night at an almost-filled Coach House--fun, diverse and well-played, albeit a good deal less than cathartic. Ironic or humorous distance does have some drawbacks.

Playing to a sit-down, college-age crowd that Gano remarked was older than the band customarily draws, the Femmes stretched out in a career-spanning 30-song set that lasted nearly 2 1/4 hours without a dull patch. The eight songs culled from “Violent Femmes” were balanced by seven drawn from last year’s “New Times,” a good album that is the most diverse and experimental in the band’s history.

Many of those first-album nuggets became boisterous sing-alongs, fight songs for kids who grew up a little warped and ticked off, but lived to tell--and laugh--about it. If the Femmes are sick of playing the hits after all these years, it didn’t show in the least. The fact that they stretched out oldies like “Kiss Off,” “Add It Up” and the show-opening “Confessions” with tough, hard-edged instrumental jams may account for the players’ ability to still attack them with relish.

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Brian Ritchie, as always, took the lead with his rumbling, freely moving bass guitar; Gano pitched in with some sparse but effective guitar moves out of the surf-rock and garage-band catalogue. Drummer Guy Hoffman, who replaced founding member Victor DeLorenzo in 1992, isn’t the shimmy-hipped showman his predecessor was, but he makes this the most accomplished Femmes lineup, both with his adept playing and his contributions to the consistently strong vocal harmonies.

The newer stuff was received almost as well as the early songs. Even such oddities as the avant-garde techno-flavored sci-fi spoof “Machine” and the Brecht/Weill-influenced German cabaret setting of “Mirror Mirror (I See a Damsel)” got strong applause.

At every turn, the Femmes had a different color to add, a new style to try out--a reggae rhythm here, a traditional folk strum there, songs inspired by rockabilly, Buddy Holly or the Velvet Underground, garage-rock-noir and surf guitar workouts, even some free-jazz blowing by horn-wielding roadies and Ritchie on conch shell.

Gano, who lets the songs take precedence over kinetic stage display (much like his key influence, Lou Reed), tossed out quips and frequent grins, while Ritchie struck guitar-hero stances without seeming ridiculous.

The Femmes are between record deals once more. They already have recorded their next album, which they plan to shop around, but they didn’t give a live preview of it. The show included just one unreleased song--a silly, snotty, minute-long punk rock snippet called “Dahmer’s Dead.”

Still--and despite those suicide notes in some of their songs--from the in-concert evidence, the day is not in sight when the Femmes would be better off taking a bow and saying good night.

Violent Femmes were scheduled to play again at the Coach House on Wednesday with shows in Los Angeles to follow, Saturday at the Hollywood Palladium and Sunday at the House of Blues.