POP MUSIC Reviews : Possum Dixon Bashes, Slashes With a Grin

Possum Dixon named itself after a fugitive wanted for murder. Playing Thursday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, the Los Angeles band lived up to that self-billing in method, if not in madness.

The four members slashed and bashed for 47 non-fastidious minutes, but they committed their flavorfully poppy mayhem with a collective grin rather than a malicious fury. There is frustration enough in the songs that chief writers Rob Zabrecky and Robert O’Sullivan churned out for the band’s 1993 debut album--most of them ‘70s New Wave-inspired takes on the old “can’t get no satisfaction” theme, with dull, dead-end jobs and inaccessible objects of lust the chief sources of discontent.

On stage, Possum Dixon just mowed down those troubles and turned its songs into springboards for old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll exuberance, applied with plenty of bouncing around and shaking all over. The musicianship could stand some tightening, but not so much that the band would lose its rawness.

Possum Dixon’s challenge is to develop the offhanded expertise of a band like Cracker and the muscular drive of the Smithereens, without reining in its gleeful rambunctiousness.