Wallinger Puts the Hope Back Into World Party

Anyone who doesn’t believe in the redemptive powers of pop music should have been at World Party’s concert at the El Rey Theatre on Sunday. Launching the show with the effervescent “It Is Time”--mixing ecclesiastical turns and a Lennon-esque love of life--Karl Wallinger (who essentially is World Party) was the very presence of faith renewed and hope rediscovered.

Though that kind of inspiring yet probing optimism marked World Party’s late-’80s work, there was reason to be uncertain going into this show. A 1993 release, “Bang!,” bore a slightly darker tone and was followed by a four-year absence during which Wallinger apparently was shaken by several emotional temblors, including the death of his mother. On the recent return album “Egyptology,” the Liverpool musician seemed relatively downcast.

Sunday, though, he was a man who had once again embraced the world’s richness--and music was simultaneously the vehicle that brought it to him and through which he can express it. The new songs were turned into celebrations, ecstatic bursts of colorful pop immaculately crafted with his usual Beatles-Stones finesse, yet spiritedly roughed up by him and his four musicians.

And there was no doubt about Wallinger’s joy in an exuberantly sloppy encore of “BBC,” the faux-’60s relic Mike Meyers and Matthew Sweet wrote for Meyers’ “Austin Powers” movie. Wallinger and his band learned it from watching the movie on hotel television. Well, inspiration comes where you find it.