DeMent’s Passionate Voice Cuts Through the Noise

Not everyone was paying attention to Iris DeMent’s performance at the House of Blues on Thursday. There was a constant buzz of chattering people--many hangers-on from several company holiday parties that had been held there earlier in the evening--throughout the club.

But she seemed to be hearing her own songs and taking them to heart, drawing strength from the personalized scenarios she described onstage as simply “people getting through” tough times.

The Arkansas-born, Orange County-raised DeMent writes with detailed, poetic grace and sings with direct passion of the tests of life: the death of her father in “No Time to Cry,” crises of faith in “Keep Me God,” the self-explanatory “Easy’s Getting Harder Every Day.”

Save for several rather clumsy, though earnest, political songs on her new “The Way I Should” album, this isn’t the contrived melodrama that dominates country radio, but a throwback to the simple-life complexities of modern country progenitors the Louvin Brothers.

So in comparison to the songs’ scenarios, the distractions of the club were no big deal. Working with a taut, versatile three-man band, she still seemed somewhat ill at ease, but used that to maximize the powerful intimacy of the songs in self-effacing asides, often delivered with her voice quavering.

But she never lost her focus, and by the time she played a four-song solo set mid-show, the surrounding chatter didn’t matter, to her or the rapt fans who were paying close attention.