POP MUSIC REVIEW - Pop Will Eat Itself Shows Some Bite at Coach House

On its album “This Is The Day . . . This Is The Hour . . . This Is This! “ Pop Will Eat Itself has a grand time chomping on as many different electronic tidbits as it can fit on one party platter.

But Thursday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, the pantry looked unpromisingly bare. No drummer to drive in the punk and metal edge that is a staple of the British foursome’s sound. No deejay to deliver the rap-style record scratching that adds to the group’s impressive abrasiveness. All of that was prepackaged on backing tracks. So were the audio bites that the band lifts from records and broadcast sources to provide humorous asides and sonic boosts.

At first, it appeared as if this techno approach to live performance was going to be a letdown. For the first few songs, it was a case of too much sound coming from tape and too little being generated by human hands.

Before long, though, the instrumental team of Adam Mole and Richard March started to make itself felt with good, noisy guitar grunge and driving bass lines that gave the show before a half-capacity house some real-time impact. With so much of the sound canned, it was essential that singers Clint Mansell and Graham Crabb give vibrant, emphatic performances that would lend the show sweat and immediacy. They delivered--especially Mansell, a manic, shirtless figure with a tangle of long, matted hair who leaped about wildly, jabbed the air with his fists and took frequent table-top excursions into the audience.

A few more hands substituting for machines would have made the 55-minute concert more of a grabber, but all in all this fun performance was a good example of real personality making up for a shortage of real persons.