WHEN Iris DeMent played in Dublin just a couple of years ago, she performed on the Tivoli stage and, with just her acoustic guitar for support, unleashed a set of miraculous, unsettling songs, charting the singer's on going struggle in getting to grips with the world around her, cataloguing some dazzling skirmishes with loss, death, love, longing and time.
Unplugged by affinity rather than as a marketing tactic, that powerful show suggested that very little could be added to DeMent's music by hiring a band.
Since then DeMent's show has filled out considerably, and a backing band has been added to the bill. Now, of course, she has three albums worth of material to mine, and isn't shy about adding a few covers of country classics to the song list. But it is more than an increase in the range of songs, or in the number of musicians that has turbocharged the experience.
All facets of DeMent's stage show now appear significantly more worked out. The show has moods, stoked up rock and acoustic mini sets embedded in its two hour expanse and even a couple of lighting tricks.
It offers, then, exactly the sort of things that her latest album, The Way I Should, leads one to expect: it is (ignoring intermittent uncertainty as to which verse of some songs comes next), tighter, more structured, frequently louder and always far more knowing than her previous efforts.
For The Way I Should, DeMent has decided to get rocky and political at the same time, but only occasionally produces melodies and lyrics with the strength of her best writing. She deals with everything from the military industrial complex to child abuse, but it is hard not to pine for her less shrilly political strand of her song writing.
The best of the new work is undoubtedly Wasteland of the Free, with a title that could have come gobbing from the Jello Biafra songbook and a line of analyses that might be paraphrased from a Noarn Chomsky lecture.
When DeMent merges the political and the personal, as for example in the trickling but insistent Our Town, she manages a neat evocation of social collapse without the burden of having to fit words like "Calvin Klein" and "corporate cash"to her melody.
On the whole, country music, no matter how progressive, provides and infectious setting for the phrase "advanced civilisation".
If all this sounds rather familiar, fans of Nanci Griffith might remember an album by her called Storms, in which DeMent's predecessor in progressive country sang witness to a similar attack of tour bus scruples. What is strange here, however, is that the new industrial strength DeMent shows seems to be yet another symptom of exactly the problem - the market driven hunt for "more" - which she seems to be highlighting.
It is in her unrepentantly personal tunes, such as My Life and No Time to Cry, that DeMent's voice, always threatening tears as it soars up through the register, is used to greatest advantage. Some tunes benefit from the attention of the rockier band - Hotter than Mojave in particular gains new strength as DeMent thunders around the desert with a drums, bass and guitar in scalding pursuit.
No beefy guitar figure, or chuny drum beat, however, ever sounds quite as loudly, as poignantly, as urgently, as the singer's lone voice.