POP MUSIC REVIEW : A Homogenized Warrant at Civic

For the casual rock guy, discussing the relative virtues of Warrant and Skid Row is like comparing Tiffany to Debbie Gibson . . . kind of a lot of fun, really, if you don’t actually have to listen to the music involved.

Warrant as phenomenon--clean-looking, hard-working, hard-rock dudes who sold a zillion albums (not to mention posters) almost by accident--is a lot more interesting than it was watching a bunch of Camaro owners holding up cigarette lighters at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on Tuesday, swaying to Warrant’s bathetic power-ballad “Heaven.” In a world of would-be Aerosmiths and Led Zeppelins, somebody has to be the Grand Funk Railroad. And Warrant’s the biggest L.A. rock group since Guns N’ Roses.

Warrant looks like a rock band all right--girl-pretty lead singer Jani Lane, guitarists scampering around the stage set like hamsters in a Habitrail--but they sound like the radio, the canned stuff that blares out of the AM on long drives across the rural Midwest.

There are some good, tight arrangements and a vocal hook or two, the feel of Saturday nights in a small-town bar and a singer who acts progressively more inebriated as the set goes on. (Lane’s between-song patter became longer and more slurred; he plugged drunkenness the way Amy Grant plugs God.) Where Axl Rose stage-dives, Lane whines for five minutes about wanting to get out with the audience, then has a burly guy carry him on his shoulders into the crowd.