Golden Smog Set Clouded by Band’s Antics

When the Midwestern all-star pickup band Golden Smog came together in 1992, its de facto leaders Gary Louris and Jeff Tweedy were regarded as leading standard bearers of the “No Depression” alternative country movement.

Louris’ credentials were tied to his work with the Jayhawks, Tweedy’s for co-founding Uncle Tupelo, the first significant alt-country act of the ‘90s, and then for starting Wilco.

Since then, however, Louris and Tweedy have cast off alt-country’s genre limitations in favor of a darker, more expansive musical palette, which leaves Golden Smog as a kind of tributary through which their more rootsy material can flow.

That’s why Golden Smog’s appearance at the House of Blues on Friday drew a larger crowd of alt-country purists than the members’ respective full-time bands are likely to attract these days.

Golden Smog is front-loaded with songwriters. Besides Louris and Tweedy, it also features Soul Asylum guitarist Dan Murphy and Run Westy Run guitarist Kraig Johnson. As such, it’s almost too versatile for its own good.

On Friday, the sextet moved from Louris’ tender balladry to Tweedy’s stark morality plays and Murphy’s rave-ups with little regard for pacing or precision.

And that’s kind of the point. Even though the songs on Golden Smog’s recent album “Weird Tales” tackle serious subject matter, the band is still a study in hail-fellow frivolity onstage. On Friday, band members traded instruments, stepped on each other’s vocal lines, and studded their set with cornball K-Tel Records compilation album cover songs.

As a crowd-pleasing strategy, it succeeded, but Golden Smog’s ragged charm became self-defeating over time. Despite having the advantage of safety in numbers, the band sounded curiously anemic onstage, like a six-member entourage in search of a band leader. Johnson’s tunes, in particular, suffered from flat arrangements and his thin vocals.

Golden Smog’s cover songs are the most anticipated segments, but instead of playing it straight with such songs as Charlie Rich’s “The Most Beautiful Girl” and Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” they played them for yuks, undercutting potentially interesting interpretations with nudge-wink hokum.

In fact, the band never really did catch a spark until the encores, when a conspicuously incognito Jakob Dylan and keyboardist Ivan Neville joined the band for decent stabs at Neil Young’s “Don’t Cry No Tears” and “Revolution Blues,” respectively. By attacking the Young material with loose-limbed fervor and a heightened degree of urgency, it was the only time Golden Smog truly lived up to its supergroup pedigree.