Kasey Chambers – Wayward Angel

The bouncy, bluesy jazz of the first track “Pony” notwithstanding, Wayward Angel finds Kasey Chambers, Australia’s #1 import to Americana music in recent years, working pretty much the same territory as on her first two releases. That’s a good thing, at least for the time being.

Chambers, in her mid-20s, is still early enough in her career that one would not expect radical departures from her just yet. She’s still in the midst of creating that material which will serve as the foundation for her life’s work, and the bedrock of that foundation is the melodic, slightly twangy singer-songwriter fare for which she has shown such a natural affinity.

There’s plenty off that on Wayward Angel, once you get past that intriguing left turn of an opener. The next three songs — “Hollywood”, “Stronger” and “Bluebird” — would all earn spots on a Chambers career compilation (though it’s admittedly a little soon to be anthologizing her work). “Stronger” is probably the best of the bunch, sporting the kind of killer-hook chorus that she first displayed on the title track to her debut, The Captain. “Bluebird” (her own tune, not a cover of the Butch Hancock chestnut) is a little lighter, sprightlier, but just as easily memorable once it’s gone by a couple times.

Chambers’ most emotional moment comes at the midway point on “Paper Aeroplane”, a gorgeous piano-and-vocal-only ballad that’s as plainly pretty as anything she has written. Her loneliness sinks in deeply as she recites a laundry-list of longing midway through the song: “But I kept your brownies/And your golden honey/I could smell your flowers/And I saved your money/And I hold your blanket/Close for hours/And I painted my heart blue.”

The second half of the record lags slightly — this probably would have been better with two or three songs cut from its fourteen-track length — but a welcome spark comes toward the end with “Guilty As Sin”, a bluesy rocker that catches a little of the same fire as the title track to her 2002 release Barricades And Brickwalls (if not quite as much as her incendiary live cover of Lucinda Williams’ “Changed The Locks”).

At some point it will probably become a priority for Chambers to venture in a considerably different direction with her music, as most all artists with true creative impulses are eventually inclined to do. In the meantime, there’s nothing wrong with just sitting back and enjoying the ride.