Lachie Hayes: Subsatellite (digital outlets)

As with any broadly defined musical genre – jazz, rock, rap, blues etc – there are invariably subsets within subsets.

Country music contains, among other smaller divisions, white Appalachian music, black Southern country, the cowboy songs of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Western Swing, the rock-influenced hat acts like Garth Brooks, the legendary Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, the Outlaw Movement and outlier songwriters like Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark and Kris Kristofferson.

In this country the genre stretches from Cole Wilson to Tami Neilson and in between are Patsy Rigger, John Grenell, Eddie Low and others.

Kaylee Bell is currently the most successful, in large measure because she has so fully adopted the sound, lyrics and imagery of a Nashville artist.

Most Americans would be hard pressed to try and identify how she differs from the local product.

Into this broad church however we now need to insert Southland's Lachie Hayes who may have his boots in country but arrives on this Delaney Davidson-produced debut album with the ramshackle rock swagger of Green On Red and the Replacements on The Likes of You: “I'd rather be lying down here in the dirt than doin' business with likes of you”.

Hayes also pulls together the raw edge of traditional blues reshaped into the harmonica-wailing Foot Stompin' Boogie, repurposes the spirit and melody of Dylan's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid for Lonesome Hearted Lovers (“cowboys out west go on surviving, I'll just be a shadow out on the horizon”) and on the title track defines himself: “I got wheels within wheels . . . you can't put me in your pigeonhole”.

That's true of an album which roars out of rockabilly on Convict Guns and goes murderously folk-country for the eerily echoed, menacing S.O.B. The string-enhanced King of the Night Out on the Tiles confirms his ability to craft a song, a story and a character.

Quite a debut.

And perhaps a more rockin' and -- as the cover art shows -- an astutely referenced kind of country music for our times.

.

You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here.