Cowboy Junkies’ Persistence Is Something to Be Thankful For

Anyone who tuned in briefly to Cowboy Junkies 10 years ago when they were the celebrated new darlings of the pop critics’ establishment would be astounded by how far incremental development can take a band.

The Junkies heard on the celebrated 1988 release, “The Trinity Session” (famously recorded for $250 in a church in their hometown of Toronto), were musical somnambulists whose songs dwelt on the cusp of an unsettling dream. On stage, singer Margo Timmins was a static, retiring figure, a beautiful but delicate flower who seemed in danger of wilting should a bright stage light fall on her.

The thoroughly engaging, musically dynamic and even outgoing performance that Timmins and her bandmates gave Wednesday at the Coach House was the payoff of persistence, not a radical make-over.

Clad in a long, red floral dress and a shyly winning smile, Timmins didn’t shrink from the bright lights that went with the brighter, more pop-accessible musical hues that have gradually entered the repertoire written by her older brother, lead guitarist Michael Timmins. She wasn’t flustered by some boisterous between-songs interjections from the crowd but bantered easily through the evening, mainly on the subject of Canadians’ bemusement over that odd American custom, the Thanksgiving dinner.

Playing off the Junkies reputation for shyness, Timmins noted that two fans in the house had asked them over for Thanksgiving (the Junkies’ resume their Coach House stand with shows tonight and Saturday), “but we had to decline the invitation because we’re too scared.”

The music was invitation enough for Timmins to add subtly sexy embellishments with swaying movements, tosses of the head and the play of that smile to lend impish or bittersweet spin to what she sang. Those fruits of experience and increasing comfort with performance allowed her to bring a warm, assertive erotic glow to “Misguided Angel,” which, along with the band’s hit cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane,” was the only song culled from the million-selling “Trinity Session.”

Now she is better able to inhabit, rather than just sing, the finely etched character studies her brother writes, in which the mood is often enriched by a detailed, textured sense of landscape and climate.

On moments of peak intensity, such as “Hunted,” a tense, swirling evocation of being the object of sexual predation, Timmins sang at a high simmer. But she never boiled over. Control remains her hallmark, but now it’s not a case of excessive reserve but of a well-honed classicism.

If fellow Canadian Alanis Morrissette is all post-adolescent urgency and florid excess as she flies off the handle at youthful upsets, Timmins brings a measured perspective that yields a sense of contemplative richness and timelessness to the Junkies’ repertoire. It doesn’t create a sensation, but it will wear well over time.

The four core Junkies, including younger Timmins sibling Peter on drums and Alan Anton on bass, have played together since 1985; adjunct member Jeff Bird has been a longtime presence on harmonica, mandolin and percussion.

Linford Detweiler, the organ and piano player from opening band Over the Rhine, was a perfect fit, especially on the set’s repeated excursions into moody and muscular psychedelic rock. Karin Bergquist, the singer for Over the Rhine, provided harmonies on some of the pithier, more pop-structured songs that have cropped up on the Junkies’ two most recent albums.

Early in the set, the confluence of a spooky, night-riding organ and distorted, probing guitar called to mind the Doors on “Blue Guitar,” a fatalistic memorial for Townes Van Zandt, an old friend of the band; that ominous feel returned near the end with a climactic, epic exploration of Robert Johnson’s chilling “Me and the Devil Blues.” Timmins drove home the aura of damnation by moaning like a chanteuse at the Twin Peaks lodge.

“Darkling Days,” “Miles From Our Home” (the title track of the band’s fine current album) and several other songs carried a warm, stately folk-rock glow that called vintage Fairport Convention to mind.

It’s easy for bands to get stuck after a striking first impression. Cowboy Junkies’ gradual progress beyond “The Trinity Session” has paid off like compound interest.

Over the Rhine, whose career has not flourished since a trio of early ‘90s releases on the defunct I.R.S. label, kept hopping a stylistic ferryboat that took it back and forth between lush art-pop a la Tori Amos, progressive-country and Sheryl Crow-like straightforward pop-rock.

Everything the Ohio band played was better than the precious, affected music it made through 1994. But, while each song had its attractive elements, especially the country-influenced ones, they weren’t enough to grab hold and draw a listener in.

* Cowboy Junkies and Over the Rhine play tonight and Saturday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $27.50-$29.50. (949) 496-8930.