POP MUSIC REVIEW : These Radiators Run Cold : Six-Piece Band From New Orleans Misses the Essence and Depth of Its Hometown Music

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO —  There is New Orleans, either the most or least American of cities, depending on one’s vision of what this country should be. It’s a big contradiction with a backbeat: simultaneously more humidly laid-back and more steamily vital than most burgs can dream of; it’s the birthplace of Southern decay and the place where indigenous culture is making an undaunted last stand; it’s always the same and always, always different. It’s places where the cab drivers won’t take you. It’s a great messy trash heap of costume jewelry and crawfish shells.

Then there’s the Riverwalk, some redeveloper’s stunted dream of an orderly, safe, regulated New Orleans: It’s like an airport shopping concourse that stretches on and on and on along a length of the Mississippi, an enclosed, air-conditioned mall of chain stores, tourist gift shops and plastic-tabled Cajunized fast-food outlets.

And then there’s the Radiators, the long-running New Orleans band that, judging by its Coach House performance Monday, owes more allegiance to the Riverwalk than to the real thing. Although the band has backed such Crescent City legends as Professor Longhair and Earl King, somehow the six-piece band misses the essence and depth of its hometown music.

The group’s sound is largely derived from Little Feat, the fabulous ‘70s L.A. band whose music drew heavily on New Orleans tradition. There also are touches of the Neville Brothers and Southern boogie bands in their playing.

But all the influences seem to run only surface-deep. Little Feat could work a New Orleans second-line groove like a locomotive, and people who train with expressive solos and Lowell George’s wry yet heart-laden lyrics; by comparison, the Radiators’ rhythms seemed synthesized, its songs clever and calculated.

And rather than offering any of the spirit and vision found in the Neville Brothers’ music, the Radiators on stage come off as merely a glorified frat-party band--and, indeed, there were a couple of guys in the audience shouting “LSU rules!”--offering slick, effortless, long-playing dance music.

The group does like its marathons: Monday’s show clocked in at about 2 1/2 hours, with a set ranging from early efforts such as “Smokin’ Hole” and “Jigsaw” from its 1981 independent-release “Heat Generation” album to its current “Total Evaporation” disc for Epic/Sony.

The band has two singers: keyboardist Ed Volker (who also writes the bulk of the material) and guitarist Dave Malone. Volker’s vocals seem well matched to his songs, in that both are glib and divorced from emotion. He makes lots of elaborate hand gestures as he sings, and their absence from his keyboard proved no great loss.

Instrumentally, Malone was much like fellow Radiator guitarist Camile Baudoin, coming from the great Southern-boogie tradition of interminable, indistinguishable guitar solos. But he’s a strong, marginally soulful singer, and the show’s best moments came when he was behind the microphone.

Those moments included a cover of Clarence Carter’s smoldering soul ballad “Slip Away” and the Radiators’ one brief flirtation with success, 1987’s album-oriented rock hit “Like Dreamers Do.” It was on that song late in the set that the band also finally hit a persuasive groove, sinking into a New Orleans second-line rhythm that seemed so forced on other songs.

Other songs in the set included the very Little Feat-like “Red Dress” and “Doctor, Doctor” and covers of the Band’s “The Weight” and Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” The latter song featured some relatively inspired playing from Malone on a Fender electric mandolin.

It’s some scant encouragement that the songs from the “Total Evaporation” album--including the slinky title track “Party ‘Til the Money Runs Out” and “Soul Deep” (not the Box Tops’ song)--carried a bit more feeling than most of the older material. Perhaps swayed by their producer, Memphis soul-music veteran Jim Dickenson, the Radiators show potential of gettingsome emotion into their clever dance tracks.

It figures, then, that they seem to be on the verge of being dropped by their label--a flyer placed on tables derided the “invisibility or inconsequentiality” that Epic has consigned them to. Still, there are greater injustices, such as the years the tame, well-packaged Radiators had a major-label contract while the Nevilles, one of America’s greatest bands, was shut out from the banquet.