SHORT of swinging in on the old St Margaret's Church bell rope, you can't make a spectacular entrance at the National Centre for Early Music.

Laura Cantrell stands quietly at the back, waiting her moment, a demure brunette facially not dissimilar to Nicole Kidman but warmer, dressed in skirt and trim blouse as if she has not fully shed the shell of her past in investment banking.

This country girl from Nashville, with a university degree, 20 years in New York and an alternative life as a radio presenter, is not a rhinestone Dolly or a Tammy. They have lived their songs. She observes astutely and wistfully, and so her voice, sweet, fragrant and fragile, skips prettily over the surface of up-tempo numbers that frame the first half of her set: Churches On The Interstate, California Rose and Wynn Stewart's Wishful Thinking; even the murder ballad Poor Ellen Smith is as bouncy as Zeberdee.

Together with the New York snapshot 14th Street and Lucinda Williams's discarded demo, Letters, they have a heady cocktail fizz. The second half's red wine songs of body and depth turn the lights down low and the tempo right down slow with Mark Spencer and Dave Schramm's guitars as her angels of mercy, and here in the role of victim on The Whiskey Makes You Sweeter and Sam Stone, or the humming loveliness of Bees, Khaki & Corduroy and Two Seconds, you find your heart saying "Tell Laura I Love Her".

Updated: 11:01 Tuesday, July 26, 2005