Laura Cantrell, Union Chapel, review For 15 years Laura Cantrell has alternated her career as a country singer-songwriter with other pursuits - working as a high-flying Wall Street executive, doing shifts as a New York radio DJ, and, for the past seven years, raising her young daughter. The purity of her approach to country music has never wavered; she respects and embraces its history while writing sturdy, thoughtful songs that can sound deceptively simple. With a new album of original material to promote, she wowed a reverent crowd on the last date of her short British tour. Hers is a stripped-down approach designed to foreground her songs: she sings and plays guitar while her accompanist Mark Spencer adds harmonies, guitar and piano. Cantrell, in an understated dark grey dress, does nothing to distract from her clear-voiced work. Wryly apologetic, she thanked the audience for their patience as she introduced excerpts from her new album, No Way There From Here. No need: the title song, a calm reflection on her own southern identity, is one of her finest to date. The instantly memorable Can't Wait has a jaunty but yearning quality; Letter She Sent is a brisk account of a woman's quiet desperation. But Cantrell is too seasoned a performer not to wheel out old favourites: the hard-driving Yonder Comes a Freight Train and the plaintive Don't Break The Heart both hit the spot. In concert, she's impeccable: you could wait a long time for her to fluff a note. And she observes the same rigorous quality control in her writing: her lyrics are telling and precise, with not a false rhyme to be heard. In much the same spirit, Cantrell generously acknowledges her sources and influences, including her heroine Kitty Wells (she included her tribute song Kitty Wells Dresses) and the late singer-writer-producer Cowboy Jack Clement; her version of his heartbreaking Just Someone I Used To Know was a highlight of the evening. So was Not The Tremblin" Kind, the title track of Cantrell's first album that launched her in Britain - boosted by the fervent admiration of John Peel. These days the song sounds almost like a mission statement: an assertion by a strong, confident, articulate woman determined to plough her own furrow - all the while reminding the country music business where it came from.