Faithfull wanders, then returns home

Marianne Faithfull began her Royce Hall concert Sunday with an uncharacteristically sunny declaration, exhuming Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s 1964 Herman’s Hermits hit “I’m Into Something Good.”

She kept some of the song’s British Invasion buoyancy, but if anyone thought that the veteran English singer was about to seriously scrap the strains of trouble and torment that have defined her music, she quickly set them straight by moving right into the more downbeat mood of her early-’80s song “Falling From Grace.”

Faithfull does try to broaden things on her new CD, “Kissing Time,” a sort of art-rock counterpart to Santana’s “Supernatural” in which esteemed elder teams with young moderns -- in her case, Beck, Billy Corgan, Blur, Pulp, et al.

It’s a good way to loosen the shackles of the image that’s clung to her since she crawled from the wreckage of her personal life in the late ‘70s with “Broken English” -- damaged innocent turned proud if shaken survivor, the ingenue voice of “As Tears Go By” replaced by a fearsome croak suitable for the scornful social screed of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” and the betrayed lover’s cathartic rant “Why’d Ya Do It?”

But the new collaborations are more bland than breakthrough, and they dominated the perfunctory and uninvolving first half of Sunday’s concert. Faithfull, backed by a four-piece band, was straightforward and casual, but she doesn’t have the vocal technique to create character and point of view purely by singing.

Her strength is as a singing actress in the cabaret tradition, and when the set hit its home stretch of signature songs from her comeback period -- “Broken English,” “Working Class Hero,” “Why’d Ya Do It?” -- Faithfull was transformed, extending her vocal range to accommodate the stories, delivering the lyrics with a startling vehemence.

It might have been more practiced, but it was also gripping. The fact that she followed that fusillade with the one new song that might match its emotion and intensity, the Pulp-powered “Sliding Through Life on Charm,” was one indication that Faithfull could still have a notable future to go with one of pop music’s most colorful pasts.