Live Review: Steve Earle & The Dukes, Kasey Chambers

As Kasey Chambers opens her set with Your Day Will Come, her voice cuts through the cavernous expanse of The Tivoli like a hot knife through butter, her vocals so powerful despite their inherent thick country inflections. Her five-piece band – including father Bill Chambers, still a guitar maestro to this day – play a brand of thick rootsy rock based around traditional instrumentation, and their combined sound is pristine throughout numbers like the sultry Pony  and the jaunty Devil On Your Back. She pulls out trump card Not Pretty Enough quite early – actually a pretty great track despite (or perhaps prompting) its commercial success – but it's the more blatantly country fare like Georgia Brown that Chambers most naturally shines. The band all gather around a single mic in the middle of the stage for traditional favourite, Old Joe Clark, before finishing a surprisingly endearing set with the evergreen The Captain.
The crowd has grown now and fills up most of the venue as Steve Earle drags his crack band The Dukes into the fray – although there would certainly have been more people here if a lot of Brisbane fans weren't on the verge of catching the great man at Bluesfest – and from the get-go it's an unmitigated delight to witness him with full band in tow, opener, The Low Highway setting the tone for the evening with impeccable musicianship complementing Earle's almost faultless songwriting. The band seem like an almost amorphous single entity as they move through 21th Century Blues and Calico County with consummate ease, while their awesomely-bearded frontman is sage-like in both looks and demeanour, this gravitas transferring casually to his music as they plough through Hard Core Troubadour and I Thought You Should Know. Earle discusses the honour and privilege of having been involved in the HBO series Treme – he portrayed the wonderful busker Harley Watt for two seasons – and then proffers a trio of songs associated with his stint on the show (That All You Got?, Love's Gonna Blow My Way and After Mardi Gras), before swiftly shifting eras with the evocative Civil War narrative Ben McCullough. Earle is effusive when discussing the merits of his band – singing their praises with genuine sincerity – and you can see why as they move through You're Still Standing There (conducted as a beautiful duet with flame-haired fiddler Eleanor Whitmore, who herself possesses a lovely voice) and poverty paean, Invisible. When the contagious rural swagger of Hillbilly Highway segues into quiet tearjerker My Old Friend The Blues, it perfectly encapsulates the full breadth of the beauty that Earle can so effortlessly summon, before he throws in Someday, itself highlighting the laid-back abandon that top-notch country music has to offer. Then it's time for the real gold – after perennial classic, Guitar Town, Earle grabs his mandolin and they run through a killer rendition of Copperhead Road, then follow that awesome coupling with Little Emperor, Mystery Train Part II and the proto-country of The Galway Girl. They finish an amazing set of music after nearly two hours with the timeless appeal of Down The Road Part II, which, after an a cappella section in the middle, morphs into Down The Road itself, a wonderful twist befitting such a captivating artist.
Earle is dragged back for more with little protestation and introduces pathos to proceedings with a hushed version of anti-death penalty ode, Billy Austin – the empathy he evokes for this sad character both incredibly mesmerising and impossibly moving – before another duet with Whitmore on I'm Still In Love With You leads into a strange down-tempo cover of The Trogg's stomper, Wild Thing – making it seem aching rather than joyous in the finest country music tradition – before the five musicians take their leave once more. When Earle returns to the stage on his lonesome with just an acoustic guitar and tells us what a great time he's had before introducing a new track from one of two new albums that he claims to be releasing this year – and then hits that new song clean out of the ballpark – it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that there's plenty of life in this old dog yet, and he certainly wouldn't mind us drinking to that…