POP REVIEWS : Flores Bridges Gap Between Lee, Raitt

Rosie Flores is the missing link between Brenda Lee and Bonnie Raitt, which may help explain why, as such a definably “country” artist, she was in both her element and the club’s Saturday night at the blues joint Jacks Sugar Shack.

One song she’d be sighing appreciatively, in high Bob Wills style, at the sound of one of Greg Leisz’s lap-steel solos on a Tex-Mex waltz; the next, she’d be picking off her own economical but considerable blues guitar solos on a straight-out rocker, the full house supplying the appreciative hollers.

Saturday’s show was a belated “record release party” for Flores’ third album, “Once More With Feeling,” which has actually been out for a few moons but is only gradually picking up notice. The Hightone release is the most representative yet of her in-the-pocket song craft and plucky sweetness, a charmer that’s probably the most purely fun album Nashville should have been responsible for and wasn’t in the last year.

Flores and her five-piece band hit upon most of the album in a set chosen largely by audience members, who picked song titles out of a jar. Her voice is so inherently winsome that even the occasional weepers come up Rosie; taking a break from originals to cover Gram Parsons’ “Sin City,” with its potentially Angst -inducing earthquake lines, she made the impending L.A. apocalypse sound like such a lovely way to burn.