The Kind Of Cool That Cool Can't Buy

Neil Jones on Laura Cantrell at London's Water Rats

A capacity crowd fills the Water Rats tonight for the return of Laura Cantrell. The chattering drone of a diverse mix of characters from tattooed techies to country hippies of the Willie Nelson demeanour fills the air. Then an utter silence falls and Cantrell starts playing.

It's like the most beautiful bird has landed on our garden tree. Cantrell plays 'California Rose', a stand-out track from her Humming by the Flowered Vine set on Matador, the cool indie label who adopted her. Only this is the kind of cool that cool indie labels can't buy, the cool in which beauty is strikingly inherent.

Cantrell's songs tonight glow with a typically easy, profound grace. The tracks she plays from a new album of Kitty Wells covers have a warm and intricate beauty, Cantrell extracting from them every emotion, sublime more than maudlin. The songs have a country-park freshness rather than a museum reverence. Cantrell's own 'Kitty Wells Dresses', which is her only self-penned song on the album, is the best new song I've heard this year, lyrically stunning, easy, and played by Cantrell with a complete lack of artifice.

The Cantrell classics, 'When the Roses Bloom Again', 'Churches Off the Interstate', 'Do You Ever Think of Me', 'Queen of the Coast' and 'Mountain Fern' have a blindingly affecting emotional quality, perfectly pitched in country heaven. In a sea of long hair and tattoos, an indie boy can't but fall in love.

© 2011 Neil Jones

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