You Can’t Judge a Buk by Its Cover : Timbuk3 Doesn’t Have a With-It Look or Personality but Knows How to Groove

While Timbuk3 has gotten funky lately, it remains anything but chic.

In an era of overt rock singing, Pat and Barbara K MacDonald, the Austin, Tex.-based husband and wife who launched Timbuk3 in 1986, are as restrained a duo as you’ll find.

Pat MacDonald’s prevailing vocal delivery is a half-spoken deadpan, kind of how James Taylor might sound if you pickled him in irony for a month or two. Barbara K’s complementary harmony singing (along with occasional leads) favors smooth, airy tones cool to the brink of sounding detached.

The MacDonalds don’t look chic, either, sporting a longhaired, jeans-clad style that’s a throwback to student dorms, circa 1972. And, after six albums and an EP, Timbuk3 carries on without any hot-band buzz. Only about 100 fans turned out to see its show Tuesday night at the Coach House. But any band that might count on drawing a hundred lovers as avid as these in a given community has a foundation to build upon.

The Timbuk3 admirers called out favorite titles throughout the 90-minute performance and made more noise toward the end of it than you’ll ever hear 100 Orange Countians produce in public without a tax hike being on the table.

“A Hundred Lovers” happens to be the title of Timbuk3’s new album, and it takes the band--which started as the MacDonalds and a beat box but now also includes drummer Wally Ingram and bassist Courtney Audain--deep into funk terrain that might seem a little odd for such low-key performers. We’re not exactly talking James Brown or Bootsy Collins here, or even the awkwardly hyperactive figure David Byrne cut during Talking Heads’ funk period.

While nobody in Timbuk3 shakes booty or has much to say between songs, the band did put down some highly credible funk. Ingram, who has played in Timbuk3 since 1991 but lately has seen the gilded side of pop as a hired hand in Sheryl Crow’s band, was a churning, syncopated, tonally diverse force on drums, and Audain anchored the groove with a percolating bass.

Barbara K, who played electric lead guitar opposite her husband’s semi-acoustic rhythm patterns, moved freely through such funk-guitar staples as the thin, spiny jangle and the fat, sassy wah-wah cry. She also proved a pretty hot rock ‘n’ roll player on “Like Water Through My Hands,” an unrecorded song that found her casting out terse, hard-edged Keith Richards shards while Ingram set down a lean, tribal beat.

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With the emphasis on grooves during the first half and beyond, Timbuk3’s typically ironic, but not quite cynical, content was less of a factor. The band wasn’t ignoring meaning--witness the bookended pairing of its 1986 sardonic novelty hit about the blithe pursuit of lucre during the Reagan era, “The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades” (here done as a good, rumbling boogie), with the mid-’90s vintage “Looks Like Dark to Me.” The latter is a sparse, tense blues wherein Pat MacDonald’s near-yodel signaled that the culture’s once-confident expectations of the mid-’80s had given way to a bad case of nerves a decade on.

After all that groove-oriented music, Timbuk3 showed that it not only has a second gear, but also knows just when to downshift. Sending away the rhythm section, Pat and Barbara K combined for an unrecorded acoustic ballad, “Your Heart,” that did away with customary Timbuk3 irony and cleverness for a pure, yearning declaration that had the openhearted ardor of a Bob Dylan love song.

Another new number, “Train Song,” again gave a straightforward romantic declaration, using large-scale imagery. Ingram and Audain returned to play hand drums on the song, giving it a folk-blues base. The folk segment of the show ended with Barbara K’s winsome lead vocal turn on “Easy.” The vocal line is one of Timbuk3’s best melodies, and Barbara K’s guitar and Pat MacDonald’s harmonica combined to produce some of the wind-swept tension of Dylan’s original, acoustic version of “All Along the Watchtower.”

Timbuk3 ended its set with “Sunshine,” a pop song that, far from exuding cynicism, yearned to break free from cloudy emotional states.

“Two Medicines” returned to funk, while sticking to the theme of the struggle for emotional balance. Veering into the Muddy Waters blues classic “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” Timbuk3 grooved hard while driving home its thematic point about what’s needed to make an emotional balancing act work.

With no chic frills or cheap thrills, but a good deal of pop smarts, lyrical intelligence and meaty playing, Timbuk3 made the case that it deserves many more than a hundred lovers in this particular port.