Cowboy Up
by Kaylee Bell
Kaylee Bell headed from hometown Waimate to Gore to win the 2007 Gold Guitar award when she was 18, a prize that included a spot at Australia’s prestigious Tamworth Country Music Festival. Thereafter, were annual trips to Nashville for songwriting and recording, awards and acceptance in Australia and back home and a swerve towards country pop.
And then Keith, her 2019 tribute to American country star Keith Urban – currently going through a high-profile separation from Nicole Kidman – which now has almost 40 million Spotify plays.
Bell is this country’s most-successful country-crossover act, opening here for Six60, American country star Brad Paisley and Ed Sheeran. She’s now based in Nashville and has effortlessly absorbed the traits of that city’s country pop: the production, song structure, accent and lyrical imagery, not to mention the boots, Stetson and tasselled jacket.
So Cowboy Up – just eight songs in 25 minutes – could slip on to American playlists easily.
She brings sass to the energetic and extremely catchy title track – a shape-up or ship-out message co-written with Kiwis Jol Mulholland and Brooke Singer – and references a cowboy lover on the rocking Red Dirt Romeo. There’s a guy in a ripped T-shirt and fading blue jeans (The Thing About Us), Walk In Tennessee Tonight and Song for Shania, another tribute to an influence and model for her career visualisation. As she sings, Shania Twain’s success showed the young Bell, “I could be a wife and be a rock star at the same damn time. Face on the cover, country music lover. Yeah, she showed me what that looks like.”
Nashville assimilation complete, mission almost accomplished. Hell, yeah.
First Rodeo
by Gina Malcolm
Queenstown-based Gina Malcolm might be more familiar as TV newsreader Leanne Malcolm, but as Gina she launches a new career with the alt-country First Rodeo, although in the run-up she tried on a few different outfits.
She has wisely left behind Temptress – Quatro-cum-biker feminist rock single – in favour of songs more coherent, consistent and, in their dark depths, demanding more of her.
With Matt Joe Gow, Adam Hattaway, Elmore Jones, Tom Maxwell and other credible alt-country artists, the 11-song album opens in uncompromising manner with the stalking Blood Left (“the bad guys had their say … I’m not okay”). With its nagging, repetitious guitar part ratcheting the tension even tighter it becomes claustrophobic. You could imagine Reb Fountain digging into it.
The closer, Knee Deep, is the brief, dirty swamp-blues.
Between these, Malcolm gets into the slightly eerie Travellin’ Heart; the pedal steel-coloured ballad Tumblin’ In is an unhurried eight minutes bringing to mind early Cowboy Junkies and Hopeful Moon could be taken straight to the Golden Guitar awards in Gore.
Shadows is a ballad soaked in regret and sadness at the loss of her mother, and In the Night twangs as a downbeat memory about youthful love.
Malcolm is feeling her way and while this is sometimes referenced in the familiar, she comes out of her first rodeo still confidently in the saddle.
Kaylee Bell tour dates: Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, November 4; The Civic Auckland, November 8; Civic Theatre, Invercargill, November 13; Regent Theatre, Dunedin, November 14; Christchurch Town Hall, November 15.
