MUSIC REVIEW : Is Singer Wright Tuned In to Country?

SAN DIEGO —  When singer Michelle Wright came to town for a Thursday night show at In Cahoots in Mission Valley, she was packing the resume of someone bound for the upper rungs of the country-music ladder. Wright has parlayed a solid grounding in the genre (both parents were country performers in her native Ontario, Canada) into an award-winning and promising career. In 1991, Wright won both female vocalist- and album-of-the-year honors from the Canadian Country Music Assn.

Wright is now touring the States to win fans and drum up interest in her second American major-label album, “Now & Then,” due for release May 2 from the Nashville division of Arista Records. But, even if she made progress toward those ends Thursday, Wright’s 90-minute performance left one with the mildly unsettling impression that she is only marginally a country act.

With her short, raven hair, pink spangly waistcoat, black body stocking and black cowboy boots, Wright seemed more a Vegas-ized confederate of Pat Benatar than of Holly Dunn or Kelly Willis. The similarity wasn’t only sartorial. Wright has a husky, powerful set of pipes, and her aggressive singing style is less suited to country than to the rock, pop, and R&B; music she listened to while growing up across the border from Detroit.

Indeed, the “Western” accouterments of In Cahoots (formerly the Confetti’s nightclub) and the plethora of starched shirts and cowboy hats were the major clues that this was a country concert; the music itself could have fit just as easily into any generic rock ‘n’ roll venue.

Such songs as the R&B-ish;, mid-tempo ballad, “New Kind of Love” (Wright’s first American single), the doo-wopish “Just a Heartbeat Away,” the pop ballad “Now and Then,” the new album’s slow blues, “A Little More Comfortable,” and a cover of Andy Kim’s 1974 hit, “Rock Me Gently,” nodded to country only from a great distance.

Even the newer, more countrified tunes, including “Guitar Talk,” the honky-tonk-rockabilly ode, “Fastest Healing Wounded Heart,” and Wright’s current K. T. Oslin-ish single, “Take It Like a Man,” were given a nondescript, rock-inflected treatment by Wright’s band (drums, keyboards, guitar, bass, pedal-steel). In that regard, the live sound mix must share the blame; the pedal-steel was so buried as to be almost inaudible, and this music desperately needed that direct link to the Nashville sound.

Of course, Western authenticity hasn’t been the paramount criterion for country-music success in a long while, and, if Wright can win enough converts and sell enough records, it won’t even be a consideration. On Thursday, she demonstrated that her talents as a vocalist are equal to that task, working extra hard to win an audience that was hearing her for the first time. The crowd’s response ran the gamut from indifference to politeness to clamorous excitement.

Given the recent success of another off-center Canadian country artist--k.d. lang--Wright might just become the sensation in this country that she is up north. And, at least in terms of pure vocal ability, her success here would be well-deserved. But, if Stateside country fans give Wright a lukewarm reception, it won’t be because she isn’t American enough, but because she isn’t country enough.