POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Byrne Emerging With a New Freedom

By RANDY LEWIS

July 7, 1994 12 AM PT

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO — What happens when rock’s sartorial Renaissance man gets buck naked?

At first, there’s a tremendous feeling of newfound freedom, as David Byrne demonstrated Tuesday at the Coach House. Long rock’s disinterested observer in the button-down collar, Byrne achieved that feeling several times in his new guise as an artist working in the emotionally exposed first person.

But then there also were a number of times when he came across like nothing so much as a man in search of a bathrobe.

Ultimately, the freed-up man won out in Byrne’s nearly two-hour set, part of a Southland swing that brings him back to the Coach House for a sold-out show on Friday.

Having jettisoned the Latin big bands that laid the foundation for his previous two solo albums, Byrne is now fronting a quartet that’s as forceful as you’d expect a rock foursome to be. Yet the band was every bit as agile and versatile as you’d expect of one backing the former Talking Heads frontman, whose career has wended its way from nerdy new wave to muscular funk to pulsating Afro-pop to sensual salsa.

He played all but two of the dozen songs off his new “David Byrne” album, songs in which he strives to achieve closer contact with his listener. (One he skipped, ironically, was the album-closing “Buck Naked.”) But simply being closer isn’t always better.

Naked can mean exposed, and in many instances Byrne reveals himself with almost painful honesty, as when he sang, “I need someone to cover me with kisses when I’m alone and scared” in “Lilies of the Valley.”

Naked can also mean just plain bare, and that’s how some of the album’s truisms sound. The lyrical straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it’s not always the most enlightening route.

What helped in concert were the moments where he expanded on the album’s arrangements and transcended the carefully thought-out quality that still pervades his music.

For “Crash,” he engaged in some Neil Young-like blasts from his electric guitar that gave voice to the feelings of pain and powerlessness in the face of death referred to in the lyrics.

That new plateau of musical and spiritual abandon carried over when he dipped into the Talking Heads songbook. It was with renewed vigor that he sang such cornerstone numbers as “Psycho Killer,” “Once in a Lifetime” and an especially cathartic show-closing rendition of “Life During Wartime.”

Juxtaposed with Byrne’s new in-the-altogether side, the Heads material proved that even a nouveau nudist can enjoy throwing on a favorite old suit once in a while.

* David Byrne plays Friday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Sold out. (714) 496-8930.