O.C. Music Reivew : Distinctively MacColl, With Spunk Galore

Touring in the United States has to be a bit disconcerting for English singer/songwriter Kirsty MacColl.

She is a thoroughly accomplished artist with as much to show for her 15 years in music as nearly any of her contemporaries. Hers is a rich catalogue of songs--wonderfully represented in her current retrospective album, “Galore”--with insightful, incisive lyrics married to the intoxicating pop sensibility of her melodies and harmonies. Then there is her voice, which has carved a distinctive niche somewhere between Lulu and Linda Thompson.

These qualities haven’t gone unnoticed in her homeland, where “Galore” recently spent three weeks in the Top 10. Here in the United States, though, it hasn’t even edged into the Top 200, and MacColl’s show at the Coach House on Thursday was far from packed.

One would hope she was feeling somewhat at home by the close of the 22-song show, which was met by two standing ovations from an audience whose enthusiasm far outstripped its size. With multilayered Beach Boys-like harmonies and thick, inventive productions (most provided by her estranged husband, star producer Steve Lillywhite), MacColl’s albums leave a lot to live up to in live performance. She was backed only by a trio of guitar, bass and drums Thursday, but the players were so vibrant and so in tune with her muse that one couldn’t have asked for more.

The rhythm section, Roger Johns on drums and Marcus Williams on bass, played with fire and precision, while guitarist Peter Glenister (who has co-written some of MacColl’s songs) provided a sturdy framework for her vocals and didn’t hesitate to turn that frame into kindling for his scorching solo breaks.

As with nearly all rock shows, it seems, a lot of MacColl’s lyrics were lost in the sound mix (don’t blame the Coach House: Her own sound man was at the controls). She made up for that with the emotional, nonverbal things a voice can convey. Still, on quieter numbers, it certainly didn’t hurt to hear that voice meet up with the wit and feeling in her lyrics. Her cover of Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets” certainly wasn’t in bad company alongside her own “My Affair.”

Breaking her lines in a brisk, Brazilian-tinged pulse, MacColl sang of getting even in a marriage on the rocks:

When we first got wed we used to stay in bed

All day and night all night and day.

We bedded half our lives away.

Well, that’s all over now. We move in higher circles.

Chomping through the upper crust, I couldn’t see you for the dust.

Then you met that girl who left you with your money spent,

And now it’s no concern of yours if I sleep with the President.

It’s my affair.

The effects of love gone wrong are given far less breezy treatment in some of her other songs. The harrowing “Can’t Stop Killing You” is about a dominating, smothering relationship while “Bad” shows a desperate urge to break free:

I’ve been the token woman all my life,

The token daughter and the token wife.

Now I collected tokens one by one

‘Til I saved enough to buy a gun.

Stylistically, MacColl’s music ranged from jaunty country to rich psychedelia, though it all bore a distinctive touch--and such spunk that it wasn’t such a jarring surprise when she closed her four-song encore with the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated.”

Second-billed quartet Fossil, from New Jersey, proved to be tuneful, clever, mildly exuberant and pretty darn unnecessary, given that its music didn’t seemed concerned with connecting emotionally.

It wasn’t all dry--singer/guitarist Bob O’Gureck got a few moody licks in during “Tethered”--but it’s not an encouraging sign when the most original and propulsive thing in one’s set is a cover of quiet Beatle George Harrison’s “Taxman.”

Local singer Kerry Getz opened the show. She has been reviewed recently in these pages, but it bears noting that with each successive performance she appears to be securing a voice of her own, one that needn’t bear the “local” designation much longer.

Getz, who usually has performed solo, was joined by second guitarist Troy Reigleman, whose finger-picking style fleshed out her music considerably, though at this early juncture in their collaboration, it was a mite stiff and tentative at times.