and AC/DC, but her spirit lies in the Tennessee mountain home of pre-showbiz Dolly Parton, wrapped in poverty's coat of many colors and pleading with the local harlot not to steal her man. On her second album, this instinctive craftswoman sings country with a renegade grace that Nashville tends to smother. "I'll be damned if you're not my man before the sun goes down," she declares within the first swaggering minute, as cranky guitars pound down power chords.
Like kindred souls Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle and Gram Parsons, Chambers shakes hands with rock, pop and blues while standing steadfastly on country soil. Produced by her brother Nash, Barricades and Brickwalls' no-nonsense clarity could've been recorded anytime during the last forty-odd years. Just as the age-old folk and bluegrass tunes of O Brother, Where Art Thou? resonated with a new audience, this restless twenty-five-year-old updates yesteryear's classic forms principally through her assured presence. Chambers sings with the expressiveness of a Grand Old Opry entertainer: Unlike singer-songwriters who excel at the internal mechanics of their craft but fumble the notes and sound the same on every song, Chambers is a performer.
But she's also a vibrant tunesmith, with famous fans to prove it. This sequel comes loaded with cult-hero cameos - veteran Nashville picker Buddy Miller, Australian rock icon Paul Kelly, Pennsylvanian songwriter Matthew Ryan, Aussie punkabilly band the Living End and Lucinda Williams herself. As that genre-crossing lineup suggests, Barricades and Brickwalls authoritatively flips from style to style. "A Little Bit Lonesome" is as blue as swingin' bluegrass can get, and her cover of "Still Feeling Blue" sounds more like an AM country classic than Gram Parsons' own masterfully played but vocally strained 1973 original. The snappy drums and melancholic guitars of "Not Pretty Enough" edge Chambers into glossy Lilith Fair territory without selling short the song's hurt. She's even better at playing the remorseless heartbreaker on haunted, ball-busting tracks like "Runaway Train" and "Crossfire" as she connects the dots between Hank Williams and Polly Jean Harvey with a charisma that's simultaneously masculine and feminine, ghostly and contemporary. It's her own star power - not her friends' - that holds together the album's extremes.
Chambers' vocal chops also mask her lyrical shortcomings. With
