Lost in the Clutter

Maria McKee should have been one of the great pop stars of the 1980s; her overstated, under-focused set Wednesday night at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana found this exceptional raw talent getting ever more lost in the ‘90s.

As the 21-year-old front woman of Los Angeles country-rock band Lone Justice, McKee debuted brilliantly with an album of hard-rocking twang and captivated crowds with the dervish-like frenzy of her performances.

She could have been the Reba McEntire of alternative-country; but, like virtually all alternative-country, the group’s “Lone Justice” album didn’t sell, and a follow-up album, “Shelter,” was a slick disaster that tried to re-hatch McKee as Stevie Nicks.

McKee recovered artistically in the early ‘90s with two solid, if commercially marginal, solo albums based in her country and R&B; influences.

Now, at 34, McKee evidently has decided that country music, for which she showed a natural instinct, isn’t her thing; nor apparently is the soul-music grounding that once enabled her to come off like a more fired-up, hotblooded Annie Lennox.

Instead, McKee pinned most of her 13-song Galaxy performance on an excessive, Broadway-like theatricality that turned her commanding voice too readily toward bombast.

McKee, wearing a simple, black-and-white outfit of blouse and slacks, with hair pulled back tightly, was friendly and unassuming between songs. But her singing was replete with overacting that telegraphed emotions and left no room for the sense of discovery that can reward a listener when an artist offers up a song with a bit of nuance and classical restraint, rather than cramming it in one’s face.

With a low-keyed backing duo supplying bass, guitars and keyboards to go with her own guitars and grand piano, McKee stripped away the sonic clutter that marred her third, and most recent, solo album, “Life Is Sweet,” an ill-conceived 1996 attempt at modern rock.

But giving four of those songs room to breathe Wednesday didn’t help them flourish. With “I’m Not Listening,” McKee assembled a scattered, sprawling mess that by turns evoked Joan Baez, circa “Diamonds and Rust,” alterna-rock cult heroine Kristin Hersh in the throes of barking psychodrama, Judy Collins singing dulcet Broadway bel canto, John Cale frothing through one of his piano-pounding madman routines, and a touch of ironic Brecht/Weill theatricality. McKee’s yen for the oversized gesture found her echoing “Ziggy Stardust”-era David Bowie on “Absolutely Barking Stars.”

There were at least encouraging glimmers Wednesday as McKee showcased new material with which she hopes to land a recording deal. “Promised Land” was a good, rousing anthem built on broad, Peter Townshend-style guitar chords (with McKee supplying some “Pinball Wizard”-ry on a rapidly strummed acoustic).

“Love Doesn’t Love Me” was the sort of freely flowing but catchy, jazz-inflected pop song that Cassandra Wilson might want to sing.

But those two songs also reflected the stylistic scatteredness that besets McKee nowadays.

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The closest McKee came to country singing was a version of her 1989 song “Am I the Only One (Who’s Ever Felt This Way?),” recently a hit for the Dixie Chicks. Although her fiance, Jim Akin, provided some sighing accents on lap-steel guitar, the version leaned more toward anthem-folk along the lines of Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom.”

A willingness to try on a wide range of styles can betoken an adventurous musical spirit, but McKee’s efforts seem forced, rather than natural outgrowths of her best work. Her failure to play anything from the “Lone Justice” album calls into question whether she is sure what she does best.

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Bob Forrest, one of the endearing, rambling wrecks of the ‘80s alterna-rock movement during his tenure as front man of Thelonious Monster, opened the show.

With Forrest, you don’t get mere heart-on-sleeve singing; you get pieces of his liver and spleen as well. His stringy voice was sometimes underpowered as he spilled out anguish in songs inhabiting nether-regions of drug-addled loserdom he knows firsthand. But it also could be deeply affecting.

Forrest, who said he is three years sober and recently signed by Goldenvoice Recording Co., is back on track to make his first album since 1992.

Accompanied by the serviceable, occasionally ambitious acoustic guitar of his new, 17-year-old songwriting partner, Josh Klinghoffer (a buddy of Forrest’s young brother-in-law), Forrest, 37, lightened the load a bit with his gift for amusing extemporizing between--and sometimes interrupting--songs.

Not all the new stuff was up to the high standards of his Thelonious days. Some melodies were static, and some of the writing settled for blunt, self-flagellating confessions of misery and failure instead of offering shadings of narrative and setting.

But Forrest, looking like a little lost boy hunched in his seat, his hands between his knees, did paint a memorable picture in “It’s Raining,” depicting a lonely figure seeking solace by playing an Irma Thomas lament over and over at 4 a.m.; it was a worthy, if darker, sequel to the Thelonious nugget “Lena Horne Still Sings Stormy Weather.”

It didn’t elude Forrest that he’s a bit stuck on songs that trace and retrace a corrosive circle of drug abuse and relationship woes. “Oh, the things I know not to say are the things I say the best / Why can’t I just shut my mouth and keep my misery to myself,” he sang in one refrain.

There’s no need to stop saying the things he knows the best; his challenge is to distill the most interesting ways of putting them.