POP MUSIC REVIEW : Lillian Allen’s Protest Verses Project Warmth

A dub poet, Lillian Allen chants and sing-songs political/social protest verses to a reggae music backdrop. In her trade, it helps to have a striking, bardic presence, like the better-known Mutabaruka. Allen, a transplanted Jamaican based in Toronto, doesn’t quite fit the bardic bill, being tiny of stature and stocky of build. Playing what was only her second Southern California show Wednesday at Club Postnuclear in Laguna Beach, she labored under another disadvantage: an audience of fewer than 20 people, who were swallowed up in a room not built for intimacy.

But Allen was able to counter with considerable strengths: her four-man Revolutionary Tea Party Band, a sharp and versatile unit sensitive to the poems’ meanings and rhythms and her own ability to convey warmth while getting beyond mere polemics and addressing the human dimension of social ills.

Some songs did come off as conventional, sloganistic broadsides against oppressors, especially as echoey acoustics made it hard to catch the finer points of Allen’s wordplay. But she hit home with more closely drawn portraits, especially “Nellie Belly Swelly,” about a child impregnated by a rapist, and “His Day Came,” about a black youth who snaps when confronted by racial discrimination that wears a benign face.

Instead of giving in to rage herself, Allen used bitter irony as a shield. But the 80-minute show, drawn from Allen’s two albums, “Revolutionary Tea Party” and “Conditions Critical,” left room for optimism and playfulness, too, and for some effective dance music in surging reggae and jazzy funk veins. Allen performs tonight at the Music Machine in West Los Angeles.