POP MUSIC REVIEW : Indigos Have Heart but Ought to Simplify

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO —  Serious intentions in pop music are praiseworthy, but it’s also helpful to remember the importance of not being too earnest.

For singers like the Indigo Girls, a fresh, young folk-rock duo from Georgia that may be constitutionally incapable of being anything but earnest, it’s vital to avoid getting too caught up with life’s big profundities.

Tell a poignant little story here, make a wry observation there, illustrate a broader concept by creating some interesting characters and situations that seem drawn from life. If you have some lyrical facility, some spark of originality and have thought things through, it should all add up to expression that will not only be thoughtful and resonant but also involving, because the message comes wrapped in the concrete, common stuff of life.

That’s how it works for the John Hiatts and Richard Thompsons and John Prines and Joni Mitchells of the world, anyway--the top-notch song crafters who know how to tell a story.

Playing for a worshipful packed house Wednesday night at the Coach House, the undeniably talented Indigo Girls--Amy Ray and Emily Saliers--were full of spirit and high purpose but too often they tripped on their own compulsion to be profound and their inability to get at Big Truths through humble tales.

They were clear and forceful when it came to putting across the earnest feelings in their songs. But those emotions often came draped in the self-consciously lofty and abstract verbiage that the songwriters seem to think is required if you’re going to say important stuff.

“Skipping stones, we know the price now, any sin will do.” “Feeding the cancer of my intellect, the blood of love soon neglected lay dying in the strength of its impurity.”

After all that, maybe we’d better stop this review for a moment and quote something Sly (as in Stone): “Sing a simple song.”

The sort of word baggage that the Indigo Girls carry around can make the mind blank out, and that makes it awfully hard for a listener to be drawn fully into a song--although that apparently was no problem for the many fans who sang along, on cue or even without a cue.

Despite their weaknesses as songwriters, Ray and Saliers often were able to lift the 90-minute show on musical merits alone. Saliers, the one with the blond hair and the torn, baggy overalls, has a rangy, supremely confident voice that can make make you overlook ponderous lyrics. She played a pretty forceful acoustic guitar too, tossing off dexterous lead licks that put an extra kick into many an Indigo song.

Ray, with her low, husky singing and basic guitar strums, was the more limited, but still capable, partner. Her main weakness was her habit of laying on a husky near-growl whenever she wanted to add emphasis: It was the sort of device that a less earnest singer might use to burlesque Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan. For the most part, though, both Indigo Girls provided a good strong whiff of coffeehouse heaven with their close harmonies and ambitious strands of counter song.

There was some lightness, but little humor, in the songs. Saliers and Ray, in good old folkie fashion, were nimble enough to supply that lack with personable, self-deprecating quips between numbers.

Most of the Indigo Girls’ songs were melodically diffuse numbers propped up by committed performances. The pithier exceptions were “Land Of Canaan,” with its direct love theme, and the fetching hit “Closer to Fine,” a trump card that the duo played with a forthright flourish to open their set.