Laura Cantrell

Probably more than any other current exponent of the country genre, Laura Cantrell manages to convey the warmth and beauty of her Southern heritage with an effortless affection, and doesn’t hold anything back tonight in treating the Barfly crowd to a beguiling master class of real, no-holds-barred authenticity that throughout has them utterly in her thrall. Taking to the stage and pulling guitar over shoulder with dead-eyed intent, she and her band veritably glow as they take us on an ebbing and flowing journey through all of the genre’s back-routes, side roads and through country alleyways that never cease to charm.

Despite the undoubted fact of her elegant Southern beauty going a long way to grabbing the audience’s attention from the very outset, Cantrell’s real artistic allure is maybe in the fact that she is utterly uncompromising in her disinterest in following any alternative movement to reintegrate country music back into the mainstream and instead seems to have disappeared totally believably into an enchanting – timeless – time-warp of the genre’s creative heyday, in which the music, particularly her own takes on “old style” songwriting, seems to take on a fresh impetus, intimacy and feeling.

Starting off with the Amy Rigby-penned ‘Don’t Break the Heart’, the accomplishedly intricate and musically variegated retinue immediately set an atmosphere of utter distinction. Humbly inserted between superb renditions of country classics like Jim and Jesse’s bluegrass stormer ‘Yonder Comes a Freight Train’ and Willie Nelson’s ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’ are these Cantrell originals which for the most part shimmer with a sensitivity and emotion that go so far as to steal the limelight off them. ‘Queen of the Coast’, a sparklingly melodic tribute to fallen sixties singer Bonnie Owens, effortlessly affects the audience as much as a beautiful rendition of the Carter Family-penned ‘When the Roses Bloom Again’. ‘Mountain Fern’ similarly is an object lesson in striking narrative and poignant melody that weaves a potent spell. Songs like another of her own, the shimmering, superbly elegiac ‘Too Late for Tonight’, and later the wistful ‘Somewhere, Some Night’ and gentle ‘Two Seconds’, crackling with emotion under Cantrell’s vocal restraint, go on to create nothing less than a mesmerising effect with a sheer tender and picturesque beauty that elevates them to fine art. And a performance of old fashioned harmony with the first act tonight Amy Allison on the Allison-penned ‘The Whisky Makes You Sweeter’ goes close to bringing the house down with a glowing warmth

Endowed with the timeless quality of expression born to only the most rooted of artists, it seems Laura Cantrell is ready to take a truly personal, beguiling and inspirational version of country music right into the heart of the mainstream. A relic as fresh as the day, tonight she and her music are a joy to behold. Any innocent creative country legacy lives on with a brilliant feminine allure.