O.C. Pop Music Review : Sexton Lets His Songs Show What He’s Worth

The cheekbones are still heartthrob sharp, and his grins can still rouse whoops from female fans, but the music that ex-teen idol Charlie Sexton is making these days hardly ranks as kid stuff.

Tuesday night at the Coach House, the singer-guitarist from Austin managed to captivate an audience purely on musical terms with a well-paced set of new and unrecorded material that ranged from rootsy rock to delicate Tex-Mex balladry, with a hint of sunny, Texas-style psychedelia occasionally tossed in for good measure.

At 26, Sexton already has logged a 10-year career full of stylistic twists and turns. On his earliest albums, he was somewhat uncomfortably miscast as a crooning pop pinup and a standard-issue guitar hero. In the early ‘90s, he stepped back from the solo spotlight and explored his bluesier inclinations as a member of the Arc Angels.

Now, as leader of the punningly named Charlie Sexton Sextet--the band actually is a quartet on record and a quintet on tour--Sexton is proving his worth not as a looker or a picker, but as a crafty, capable and engagingly personal songwriter.

The show began in a subdued fashion. With Sexton plunking away at piano and the band gently droning on an unlit stage, they slowly gave shape to “Plain Bad Luck and Innocent Mistakes,” the centerpiece composition from the Sextet’s debut album, “Under the Wishing Tree.” By the end of the song, the rail-thin bandleader had picked up the first of many guitars, and the energy level rose significantly.

Sexton didn’t indulge in much fast-fingered heroics--he built his parts and solos with inventive textures and rhythms. He turned to mandolin or electric dobro to add just the right sound to softer songs such as the grumpily depressive “Ugly All Day.” Using a bottleneck slide, he added some more subtly energized licks to the propulsive groove of “Home Sweet Home.”

It may have taken Sexton years to find his way as a writer, but on the new material his talents and objectives seemed perfectly meshed. “Sunday Clothes” and “Spanish Words” were both particularly powerful, the singer using his grittily expressive tenor to deliver evocative, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tales.

Sexton’s music was expertly brought to life by the four members of his band. The lineup mostly backed Sexton with bass, drums, organ and violin, but the players all showed impressive versatility, picking up different instruments throughout the set to fit their leader’s shifting arrangements. Susan Voelz, formerly of Poi Dog Pondering, created some of the evening’s musical high points each time she was given the opportunity to cut loose with her violin.

Sexton’s lyrics are still overly earnest on occasion, and his songs sometimes lumber under the weight of their dusty melancholia. But each time the set started to drag, things were fired up again with a rocker. “Dark”--dedicated somewhat tongue-in-cheek to the surfers in the crowd--picked things up with some of Sexton’s chunkiest guitar work, and the chugging “Railroad” had the band working on a cranked-up boogie groove.

The young veteran was a warm and good-humored presence on stage throughout the evening and rewarded an appreciative crowd with an encore of high-spirited songs the Sextet hasn’t gotten around to recording.

The evening’s closer was titled “The Goodbye Song,” but it’s doubtful he’ll be packing those guitars up for good any time soon. The strength of this show made it clear that he’s got quite a bit of music worth sticking around for.

Sexton was preceded by Mary Karlzen, a talented singer-songwriter whose music is foursquare rock with a touch of country twang. She’s a clever writer and a powerful, idiosyncratic vocalist, sounding a bit like Natalie Merchant after a blast of helium. But the music didn’t do much to excite--her band’s playing was occasionally ragged and often fairly generic. They finished at their best with “Dime Store Life,” a tuneful, finely rendered tale of small-town frustrations.