POP MUSIC REVIEW : Wire Train on a Track Well Traveled

Back in the mid-’80s, San Francisco’s Wire Train was briefly a leading entry in the post-R.E.M. alternative-rock sweepstakes, with its derivative but attractive song “Chamber of Hellos.�

After a three-year absence, the band operated on Sunday at the Roxy largely in the shadow of current alternative-rock contender World Party--no big surprise, considering that Wire Train guitarist Jeffrey Trott toured as a member of that band earlier this year. But the problem then is the problem now: Singer-songwriter Kevin Hunter has neither the moxie nor the mystique of R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe or Party chief Karl Wallinger.

For much of Sunday’s hour-plus show the quartet (augmented by a keyboardist) did an adequate job of covering the same expansive kind of Dylanstones territory that World Party often travels. But simulation was all it was: Hunter and crew lack the vision to make it more.

Not that Hunter doesn’t want to be seen as a visionary; he seems to want it real bad . The nadir came with “Tin Jesus,� a ponderous attack on organized religion with music that sounded like an excerpt from Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.� In the band’s best new song, “Spin,� some legitimate rock momentum was cast aside in favor of a brief psychedelic diversion in which Hunter quoted “Light My Fire� and “Let’s Spend the Night Together� like words from God.

And then there was an encore of Neil Young’s “Mr. Soul,� during which Hunter coaxed the crowd into free-form “hippie dancing.� As if it was ancient history, Hunter explained, “The hippies didn’t like rules very much.� But he should remember that the music figures he refered to did follow an inviolable rule: Shut up and rock.