On paper, there’s something almost anonymously simple about Lydia Loveless. Her third album, the Bloodshot-endorsed “Somewhere Else,” is full of tracks whose straight-forward titles — “Hurts So Bad,” “Really Want to See You,” and the like — perfectly match the sentiments they contain, and the music sticks largely in meat and potatoes mode. The unpolished guitars slash, the drums pound, the slightest hint of twang differentiates the playing from any number of bar bands, but just barely.
Yet just because something sounds simple doesn’t mean it is simple. The more gigs Loveless plays, the more people are starting to notice the raw power driving her rock and roll exorcisms of love, lust, heartache and loss. At Lincoln Hall Friday night, Loveless’ excellent recordings served as mere templates for an almost uncontainably passionate performance, with her rough and tumble band cranked up and the singer/guitarist herself digging deep into her personal darkness to pull out painful truths like knives drawn from a dead body.
“I don’t think I’m ever serious,” Loveless quipped as she goofed around with her band between songs, but as the set neared the two hour mark and her mood darkened perceptibly, you could see confessions such as “Wine Lips,” “To Love Somebody” and “Verlaine Shot Rimbaud” (“’cause he loved him so, and honey, that’s how I wanna go”) take their toll. Her joking stopped, her eyes fixed on some far-off place, her habit of squeezing more words into a line of a song than comfortably fit suddenly seemed like a desperate race to spit out her feelings as fast as possible. She called “Mile High” her favorite, and it was hard to tell what she liked best about it: strumming the huge hooks or the chance to revisit whatever inspired it.
Later, briefly taking a break from her band for a short stretch accompanying herself on electric guitar, Loveless offered an almost uncomfortable intimacy between audience and performer that hardly lessened the evening’s intensity. When her band returned to wrap up the night with “Boy Crazy,” the song ended in a cloud of feedback, with Loveless prone, finally rising just to make a quick exit without so much as a smile or a wave goodbye.
“Singer/songwriter” might connote something safe, but one could easily imagine Loveless as part of the punky motley crew that comprised her big sister Jessica Wabbit’s fellow Columbus, Ohio band the Girls!, whose opening set could have been a shambles but whose power-pop proved sharper. Mere months from the death of their guitarist Joey Blackheart, the band played like it had nothing to prove and almost dared you to dislike it for its devil-may-care attitude.
