Rick Shea”The Buffalo Show” Major Label RecordingsCountry...

Rick Shea

“The Buffalo Show”

Major Label Recordings

Country music needs a Nirvana, or maybe even a Samson--somebody who can come along and pull down the temple of boredom that’s been built up by the Philistines who rule establishment Nashville. Come that twangy revolution, Rick Shea and many others like him will be able to move out of the margins and find the audience they deserve.

Shea, a Covina-based singer-songwriter, has been leading bands and working as a guitar-playing sideman on the Southern California country bar circuit for more than 15 years. Those obscure labors yield bountiful fruit on his belated debut CD. “The Buffalo Show” is full of expert playing and songwriting rooted in country tra dition, broadly defined to include Cajun and Mexican, rock and folk influences. Far from the same old stuff you’ll hear on hit-oriented country stations, it uses tradition not as an excuse for stodginess but as a springboard for personal, idiosyncratic expression.

Through most of the album’s 17 songs, Shea delves deeply into melancholy, unafraid to present a primarily pessimistic outlook. Some songs have the simplicity and directness of classic country music, and Shea shows an especially winning way with Spanish heartbreak ballads of uncommon melodic grace. But his very best songs cultivate mysteries.

I can’t precisely pin down the meaning of this refrain from Shea’s rousing leadoff track:

*

But when the rattlesnake daddy’s daughter

And her uncle named ol’ Jack Crow

They come around from outside of town

It’s time for the buffalo show.

*

But I think “The Rattlesnake Daddy’s Daughter” has something to do with life being a colorful, alluring, messy and threatening cavalcade of experiences that can’t always be reduced to simple expression. The exuberance of the song’s rocking, fiddle-driven Cajun music signals Shea’s willingness to embrace those experiences, troubling and difficult as they might be.

The exquisite “Sycamore Grove,” a melodic gem with a timeless, folk-ballad feel, leaves itself open to interpretation: Is it a tragic tale in which a young girl ventures where she’s warned not to go and is killed by a stranger, or (as I prefer to hear it) a tale of magical transformation in which an illicit rendezvous takes her beyond the bounds of her narrow, suspicious, small-town upbringing? Mainstream country dares not leave such loose ends dangling, but strong art is usually about loose ends rather than tidy packages.

Shea’s reedy, understated voice is as folksy and inviting, in its way, as James Taylor’s. His nuanced phrasing subtly brings out the most in a lyric. Besides his singing and songwriting, Shea turns in first-rate performances on acoustic, electric and pedal steel guitars and surrounds himself with such splendid players and harmony singers as Jann Browne, Heather Myles and Chris Gaffney.

It really is time for “The Buffalo Show” and for all it says about country music’s artistic possibilities.

(Available from Major Label Recordings, P.O. Box 661053, Los Angeles, CA 90066.)

Rick Shea plays May 21 at 8 p.m. at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, 310 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica. (310) 828-4497.