POP MUSIC REVIEW : Sitting Ovation for BoDeans in Coach House Appearance

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO —  The BoDeans didn’t exactly “stand naked,” as one of their anthem refrains puts it, but they did benefit by doffing a few layers of sonic outerwear in an acoustic-oriented show Friday night at the Coach House.

After a promising start with a roots-oriented debut album in 1986, “Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams,” the Wisconsin band has gotten into a bit of a rut. Its tendency on three subsequent releases has been to polish and inflate its sound while reaching self-consciously for grandeur along the lines of Bruce Springsteen and U2.

According to club owner Gary Folgner, the band had skipped the Coach House on recent tours because it didn’t want to play to sit-down audiences. While continuing to appear as a full-on electric band on their current tour, the BoDeans decided to include the Coach House this time, leaving behind some of their amps, their electronic keyboards, and part of their drum rig to try a more intimate approach for one night.

Maybe Friday’s well-received performance will persuade them that small and simple can be beautiful.

Raphael Gayol used brushes rather than sticks much of the time on his stripped-down kit, yet still managed to prod the music with a satisfying kick. Bob Griffin used a semi-acoustic bass guitar, and Michael Ramos tickled a grand piano and an accordion instead of a stack of digital keys. Kurt Neumann played a Telecaster on some songs, but he and the band’s other front man, Sam Llanas, stuck mainly to acoustic guitars.

As the first third of the two-hour concert went by, the change in approach yielded nothing special. The songs were uninvolving, hewing close to that fervent go-for-grandeur mode. It quickly became obvious that the BoDeans lacked a distinguished instrumental soloist to complement the good rhythm section and the solid harmony singing of Llanas and Neumann.

Song after song would hit a spot where an expressive guitar or piano flight might have lifted it beyond the ordinary, but the BoDeans just didn’t have that ammo in their arsenal. What lead guitar work there was fell to Neumann, whose efforts were tentative at best. Ramos didn’t venture any Bruce Hornsby or Ian MacLagan-style bursts, sticking instead to rolling undercurrents.

Luckily, what had been a bland performance turned into something ultimately fine when the BoDeans reached into their song bag for less ponderous material that offered a touch of humor and unforced, roots-rocking energy.

The BoDeans’ best asset is Llanas’ distinctive voice with its combination of throaty body and nasal, trebly reediness. The band began playing to that strength with “Still the Night,” a sound-alike of Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” that combined a wry bounce with a melancholy plaint. When the BoDeans segued into Millie Small’s 1964 ska hit “My Boy Lollipop,” it was evident that they were ready to have some fun with more colorful songs.

“Go Johnny Go,” written early in the band’s career but never released, was a lively Tex-Mex departure that brought a witty musical subtext to the tale of a robber on the run (“Johnny lost his halo, down around Laredo,” Llanas sang). The border-music influence resurfaced in “Angels,” with its echoes of Buddy Holly and Richie Valens, and in Neumann’s waltz “Beaujolais.”

A chunky cover of “Trying to Get to You” and Neumann’s slinky “Do I Do” (it recalled Donovan’s “Season of the Witch,” which might have been a nice one to toss in there, a la “My Boy Lollipop”) kept the emphasis on rocking for fun. “Dreams,” with its fine, reaching chorus, proved that BoDeans could score with an anthem, too. In a smart move, Llanas recast one of those overblown Springsteenesque pieces, “Beautiful Rain,” as a solo number that allowed him to wax fervent without over-emoting.

“Misery,” a country-rockabilly put-down of a “queen of the one-night stand,” got a big reaction, prompting Llanas to wonder aloud: “What is it about that song that makes people so happy?” The answer, most likely, is that it brings a familiar, earthy situation to life--a quality that is a lot more appealing than some of the band’s self-conscious bids for grandeur and profundity.

Openers Lowen & Navarro joked that the audience was getting a two-for-one deal: Like the BoDeans, the group from Los Angeles used acoustic-rock settings and featured a tall Euro-American and a short Hispanic-American singing harmony.

With cello, upright bass and idiosyncratic percussion work behind the sweetly entwined voices of Eric Lowen and Dan Navarro, the set could have been an interesting departure. But Lowen & Navarro’s repertoire was straight-down-the-middle romantic pop that aimed for the mainstream and stumbled toward cliche far more often than it reached for fresh expression. A couple of quieter, darker songs, “Not Like You” and “Walking on a Wire,” worked best, along with “I’ll Set You Free,” a catchy anthem the duo wrote for the Bangles with Susanna Hoffs.