POP MUSIC REVIEW : The Call Focuses on U2 Terrain, Wins With Chancy Flight Plan

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO —  Some disparagers have referred to the Call as U3, and that estimation isn’t without some basis. Like those of Bono and company, Call leader Michael Been’s lyrics draw from a questing Christianity. He likewise voices those lyrics in a mock-operatic romance style, and the band often aims for a not-dissimilar, dramatized, atmospheric, chiming-guitar sound.

But, as amply evidenced in the Call’s two-hour Coach House performance Sunday night (the quartet will appear there again Friday), there is as much to set Been and his cohorts apart from their Irish brethren as there is to link them, and those differences are nearly all strengths.

Chief among them is that bassist Been, guitarist Tom Ferrier, keyboard player Jim Goodwin and drummer Scott Musick back up their words of inspiration and searching with music that also reflects those qualities. The chances U2 takes lately seem mostly to involve Bono’s limbs, as he teeters on speaker towers and such; the Call’s richly varied music soared over some thorny territory with an unfettered, revelatory zeal.

With the guitar and keyboards holding down the rhythmic pulse as often as not, Been’s fretless bass was free to act at times like an expressive voice commenting on the lines he was singing, and in other instances like a wild elephant trumpeting his approach.

On the Bo Diddley-beat “It Could Have Been Me,” Been’s technique rambled amid an equally wild menagerie of guitar and keyboard sounds, all verging on chaos. It proved an ideal underpinning to Been’s out-of-breath vocal, seemingly reeling under the realization that fate--which can leave one wealthy, homeless or dead on a battlefield--makes brothers of us all.

Been was tapped by Martin Scorcese to play the apostle John in “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Like that film, much of Been’s work wrestles with reconciling spiritual absolutes with the day-to-day vagaries of life.

In earlier songs and performances, Been could seem grimly apocalyptic and just a tad pompous. But with the group’s last three albums (1986’s “Reconciled,” 1987’s “Into the Woods” and last year’s “Let the Day Begin”), his cadences found more of a heartbeat, and the music has grown appropriately warmer and more deeply textured, sounding a bit like a digital-age version of the Band (whose organist, Garth Hudson, was an early Call member).

Nearly all of the show’s 21 songs were drawn from those three albums; calls throughout the evening for the early ‘80s alternative-radio hit “The Walls Came Down” were answered with recent, less familiar songs. By the time the band finally obliged with “Walls”--seven songs into their encores--the familiar song seemed thoroughly eclipsed by the “Let the Day Begin” material.

Those songs ranged from “Jealously,” where Been’s impassioned vocal seemed to be crying out from a spiritual vacuum, to “For Love,” in which the band tackled jubilation with a roadhouse rhythm, as Been strapped on a Telecaster to join in snaking guitar lines with Ferrier.

The Call plays Friday at 9 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $17.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.