MUSIC REVIEW : Carpenter Ropes ‘Em In at Fairgrounds : Concert: Despite her sometimes pedestrian approach to song construction, the citified cowgirl keeps folks happy with her literate lyrics and great voice.

Mary-Chapin Carpenter represents the logical, ‘90s extension of the late-’70s urban cowboy: the urbane cowgirl. Through four albums filled with canny introspection and wry, pointedly female observation, the Brown University grad and Washington, D.C., resident has given a sharp, citified focus to the current trend in “singer-songwriter” country.

Even when her music sounds prosaic, Carpenter’s literate lyrics and indigo alto put a half nelson on one’s attention. That worked to her great benefit Thursday night when Carpenter performed to a capacity crowd of 2,500 at the Del Mar Fairgrounds’ Grandstand Stage. Accompanying herself on acoustic guitar and backed by a yeoman quintet that painted in broad, ensemble strokes and downplayed individual heroics, Carpenter stuck to her low-key approach and still managed to keep her audience corralled.

Carpenter got the proceedings off to a bracing start with the hit “Never Had It So Good” from 1989’s “State of the Heart” album, then followed in quick succession with “You Win Again” and “Going Out Tonight” from 1990’s “Shooting Straight in the Dark.”

When she finally spoke, Carpenter sardonically referred to the songs as her “most recent ex-boyfriend trilogy.” Their three-stage narrative--swallowing one’s pride to hold a relationship together, watching it fall apart anyway, seeking diversion as an escape from the resulting pain--established the confessional tone of the first half of the show.

However, the three tunes also exposed a pedestrian approach to song construction that isn’t as obvious on Carpenter’s albums. There’s a certain medium-tempo, strum-a-dub rhythm that has a hallowed place in country music; its infectious bounce makes it especially useful in a concert situation, where the mandate to entertain makes bon temps the roulez and not the exception.

Carpenter’s first three selections were almost identical in their employment of that rhythm and tempo, and the frequency with which similarly paced tunes appeared in the rest of her set indicated that she goes to that well too often. On record, with production values and savvy song sequencing to set them apart, these songs seem isolated, distinct. Herded together with their stablemates, though, such songs as “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” and “I Take My Chances” (from the new album, “Come On Come On” betray an unnecessarily limited rhythmic arsenal.

Not that Carpenter’s fans seemed to care. They pressed together in front of the temporary stage, and the audience seated in bleachers behind them were perfectly willing to follow the singer’s lead. When she introduced the 1990 song “Middle Ground,” Carpenter paused between each descriptive, and the crowd was more responsive with each utterance.

“This next song is from the point of view of a 30-ish, urban-dwelling, single, depressed, cynical female,” she announced with exaggerated deliberation.

“Middle Ground” is a well-scripted relating of a woman’s biannual visits to the family homestead, where she inevitably finds herself answering all the questions about her life that she spends the rest of the year avoiding. It’s a scenario that either sex can relate to, but with an added dimension of pathos, given the difficult choices facing the contemporary, single woman. Yet, again, the song’s serrated edge was blunted in concert because it seemed cut from the same cloth as the other strum-a-dubbers.

Carpenter’s ballads were the evening’s salvation. The new album’s “Rhythm of the Blues” nicely downshifted the show to a more contemplative tone, smoothing a place for two tunes--”Something of a Dreamer” and “This Shirt” (“State of the Heart”)--that underscored the detail-oriented, coffeehouse-folk of her early work.

Carpenter’s voice is an organic instrument. When she’s pushing it hard in its upper register--as she did Thursday on “Passionate Kisses” and “The Hard Way”--it recalls a young Anne Murray. In its softer, lower register, it assumes the almost disembodied quality of an incantation slowed down and filtered through gauze.

After a comparatively harder-rocking passel of tunes that included the country-funk “Read My Lips” and the new album’s Chuck Berry-ish “I Feel Lucky,” Carpenter slowed things down with the Appalachian-flavored “Halley Came to Jackson.” On this song, about the 1910 appearance of the comet over a then-small Mississippi town, the band kicked in with understated, tasteful accompaniment on dobro and accordion.

Then, Carpenter slipped into a hush to sing the reverie “Come On Come On”--her diaphanous voice billowing on the chorus’ breezy exhortation. Although she would close the show with the hot-footin’, Looziana-style wheeze-and-squeeze “Down at the Twist and Shout,” Carpenter’s low-voltage delivery on “Come On Come On” was a high point of the show. What’s more, its radical contrast to the popular zydeco hit provided an example of the kind of rhythmic variety Carpenter would be well- advised to pursue in future concerts.