POP MUSIC REVIEW : Thoroughly Unrewarding Evening, Compliments of Rock Singer Fiona

LONG BEACH —  Performing at Bogart’s on Tuesday night, hard rock singer Fiona encored with her Kip Winger duet hit “Everything You Do (You’re Sexing Me),” a song that does raise a bit of a grammatical question. The last time anyone checked, sexing was understood to be the job of determining the gender of farm critters, which can be a fairly demanding job when upending baby chicks and such.

In Fiona’s case, such a determination shouldn’t be so difficult, even for Kip Winger. Indeed, there was nothing about her or her 13-song set that called for much figuring out. In a show as calculatedly generic as she and her four-piece band presented, about the only thing left to comment on was how poorly executed it all was.

On the positive side, the diminutive singer has mastered the “agonized hair whip,” sending her long tresses flying every time her dimensionless screams weren’t sufficient to convey the depth of emotion in lines like, “Ooh you’re sexing me--Baby baby baby come on.”

It proved far more effective than her oft-employed “so overcome with emotion I gotta fall to my knees” maneuver, which lacked true gravity. Used in conjunction with the hair whip, though, there was an almost archetypally ersatz quality to it, harking back perhaps to the days when Viking women would practice gnashing and grieving for the day when their Lars might come home with a pike through his midsection.

Like a great deal of hard rock and metal, there was an overblown Nordic saga character to much of Fiona’s music. When not concerned with getting sexed, her lyrics most often dealt with thunder, tidal waves, volcano eruptions and other large, portent-laden events. But they and the accompanying crunch-chord music were such common stuff that they didn’t seem so much composed as perhaps drafted by an entertainment lawyer.

Her vocals and the band’s playing were equally overblown. Although some singers have made a fine art of non-stop screaming (Janis and Cheap Trick’s Robin Zander in their early days are two good examples), Fiona’s tonsorial tantrums only suggested what a young Pia Zadora might have been like if she had followed Pat Benatar’s lead, with Fiona’s marked lack of vocal control also adding just a hint of Yoko to the rock ballad “Victoria Cross.” Meanwhile her band pummeled along in a thoroughly plain-wrap manner, with all the requisite ominous synthesizer patches and meganoodling guitar work.

Despite eliciting only a smattering of applause from the Bogart’s crowd, Fiona and trow encored with Rod Stewart and the Faces’ “Stay With Me,” a song begging to be left slumbering in the ‘70s. Even with all the echo masking her voice, Fiona’s singing seemed particularly unskilled when pushed into comparison with Stewart’s. But, given a good media push, she still might have what it takes to star someday in the halftime show at the Rollergames.