POP MUSIC REVIEWS : AUSSIE MESSENGERS LEAVE A WELCOMED CALLING CARD

Seems like everybody’s a specialist and nobody’s a generalist in rock these days. Australian Paul Kelly, however, is a generalist and a pop classicist to boot.

Kelly and his crack band, the Messengers, headlined the Roxy on Monday with an hour and a half that incorporated heavy doses of country and hard-ish rock with the constant connecting thread ofBeatle-esque power-pop--and, in the midst of all that pilfering, Kelly never failed to sound like an artist who has found his own true voice somewhere in between the cracks.

His voice never quite soars literally, and his dark-haired looks aren’t quite teen-dream stuff. In those ways, he’s not exactly like Crowded House’s Neil Finn, a fellow purveyor of the Down Under Invasion that takes up where the ‘60s British Invasion left off. But Kelly’s gift for great pop hooks is on the same high level--as evidenced on a terrific American debut this year, “Gossip”--and he’s equally subversive in what he does with them.

What Kelly does is construct sprightly melodies around less upbeat sentiments. Thus, “White Train” becomes the most two-steppin’-est country song ever written about amphetamine addiction. No Randy Newman, though, Kelly is willing to put heart-on-sleeve as often as tongue-in-cheek--and that’s where his figurative voice is so strong: a penchant for sincerity right alongside his gift for irony.

The Dire Straits-style dynamics applied to “The Execution” and the tender ballad treatment given to the earnest encore “You Can Put Your Shoes Underneath My Bed” also provided more straight and dramatic music approaches amid all the sneakier power pop.

But it’s insurgent, bouncy bop like “Before the Old Man Died” that is really the Messengers’ calling card, with Steve Connelly’s clean-and-stinging guitar leads, Pedro Bull’s quasi-Farfisa synthesizer updates and wrestler-size skinhead Chris Wilson’s spastic harmonica and sax outbursts. If this really is the current wave of the Australian Invasion, let’s welcome the arriving troops.