It’s written right here in subsection 218 of the “Sacred British Cows” chapter of the (Semi)Professional Rock Critics’ Catechism and Field Manual that any discussion of former Jam and Style Council frontman and prolific rock-folk-soul journeyman Paul Weller must mention that he’s Huge in the U.K. and more of an Anglophile footnote in the U.S.

So did y’alls hear that? In the mother country, he’s a Hyde Park-filling megastar; here in the colonies, he’s the guy who sings “A Town Called Malice”. Which is plenty fame enough for him to pack the 9:30 Club on a Saturday night while he burns through a two-hour, double-dozen-song survey devoted mostly to the latter half of his 30-year-career, and particularly to his sprawling, willing, intermittently inspired new album, 22 Dreams.

I’ve always been more curious about Weller than knowledgeable — I’ve got a couple of his well-thought-of solo discs, and a Style Council best-of, and I’m pretty sure a CD compiling the first pair of albums from his seminal mod act The Jam is one of the 400 or so discs lodged under the seat of my car. Fortunately, Weller is the kind of forceful performer for whom familiarity is not a prerequisite for satisfaction. Fortunate for him, too, since the seven numbers he played from his new album (mostly worthy, though the drippy piano ballad “Invisible” was a momentum-killer) were met mostly with blank stares from an otherwise unusually attentive and boisterous 9:30 crowd. (The instantly-digestible folk bounce of “Sea Spray” managed to get a singalong thing going, though.) “If you don’t know these songs, fair enough, but you should go and buy the record and then you’d know ’em,” Weller pitched, which was as much as he said at once all night.

Photo by Kyle Gustafson