POP REVIEW : HIATT KEEPS CARDS CLOSE TO THE VEST AT PALACE

John Hiatt more or less laid out his turf in his opening song Saturday night at the Palace. Singing unaccompanied, tagging each line with a blood-curdling yelp, he cast himself as a Confederate soldier dancing on the enemy’s grave. His rebel’s hymn was chilling in its sheer vindictiveness. Instead of lamenting being conquered, he revels in the fact that 300,000 men died conquering him. He even wishes it had been three million.

As a singer-songwriter trying to find a niche in the rock world, Hiatt has cast himself as a rebel, but on stage at the Palace he seemed a little too warm to carry it off. Rather than a raging maverick, he’s an ornery, acidic wordsmith and a white soul singer with a rocker’s heart. An Indiana native, he sometimes comes off as a heartland Costello, and when he cranks it up it’s like ZZ Top with a shave and a master’s in modern lit.

This is the kind of thing that attracts critical acclaim and an underground following. Those are the cards Hiatt is holding right now, and it’s unclear how he’ll parlay them into something more. His words and music tend to get knotty (but nice), and it’s hard to imagine him suddenly becoming hip and trendy.

While the Palace show had its impressive peaks, it didn’t come across as a triumphant breakthrough. In his vest and bow tie, Hiatt looked like a waiter at a smart restaurant. With his taut, mischievous air, he also looked like a waiter who might suddenly dump the salad on his head. Or on your head. His flippant, loony manner complemented the off-the-wall nature of his lyrics, but Hiatt lacks the dramatic instincts to generate a gripping tension from his personality.

That left the burden on the music, and here things were mixed. His four-member band was adequate but is apparently unable or not required to develop much variety of flavor and texture. At times its riffing got too thick and clogged up the beat--and though Hiatt can do melodic wonders with such unpromising titles as “Warming Up to the Ice Age,” the beat seems to be what he’s most interested in.

It’s the beat of soul, gospel, blues and R&B;, and when he hits it right, Hiatt locates an unlikely cross between the sweetness, richness and ruggedness of black music and the guilt-ridden vitriol of singer-songwriter rock poetry. Saturday’s high points came when Hiatt was joined by black singers Bobby King and/or Freida Woody: a version of the Spinners’ ‘75 hit “Living a Little, Laughing a Little,” and some of Hiatt’s better black-influenced originals--”The Crush,” sung with King, sounded like a lost Sam & Dave gem.

Hiatt’s keen, edgy voice is appropriately eccentric, but too often it seemed constrained by an instrumental straitjacket. During one section of “Ice Age,” he edged into a free-form area with transfixing ominousness.

The freedom and immediacy of that moment made it clear that there’s something special about Hiatt. It’s up to him to zero in and create more like it.