Cowboy Simple - Broadcasting From Somewhere Between a Truck Stop and 1976

Some records sound like they should be coming through an old car radio somewhere after midnight.

Cowboy Simple’s debut — a warm, loose and wonderfully hard-to-pin-down collision of country, soul, disco and roots music that feels like somebody just discovered a forgotten box of records from the ’70s.

Australian outfit Cowboy Simple release their self-titled debut album through Personal Best Records, and if you're looking for a neat genre to file it under, you might be there for a while.

The band describe what they do as “discofied country and truckstop soul,” which gets you considerably closer than most conventional descriptions. Across ten tracks, country music wanders into soul, disco slips into roots rock, and the whole thing carries the warmth and space of an era when Rhodes pianos, pedal steel and a good bassline could happily occupy the same song.

At one end there's the wide-open melancholy of “Winter In Montana.” Elsewhere, “Rollin’ On” and “If I Can’t Make It On My Own” settle into the lonely, late-night soul of somebody who's been driving for too long. Then tracks like “Seven Year Ache” and “How Long?” lift the tempo without losing that slightly bittersweet quality that often makes a great pop song stick around.

The references are broad, but somehow they make sense together. You can hear traces of the polished countrypolitan world of Glen Campbell and Charlie Rich, the country-pop storytelling of Dolly Parton and Tanya Tucker, and then, around the next corner, the deep New Orleans pocket of The Meters.

Rather than simply recreating those sounds, Cowboy Simple let them run into each other. Pedal steel from Oliver Thorpe drifts through much of the record, tangling with Rhodes and Wurlitzer piano, sparse acoustic guitars and basslines that owe as much to soul music as they do to Nashville. There's space between the instruments too, giving the songs room to move rather than polishing every available corner.

At the centre of Cowboy Simple are former SWOOP and Professor Groove & The Booty Affair alumni Roland Kapferer and Joshua Beagley, but this was never going to be a two-man affair. They've surrounded themselves with something resembling an Australian version of the old studio wrecking crews — players including Michael Di Francesco on bass, Terepai Richmond and Declan Kelly on drums, Thorpe on pedal steel and Harry Sutherland on keyboards, alongside a larger cast of musicians and singers.

In fact, there are no fewer than five lead vocalists across the album's ten tracks, and that changing cast becomes part of the record's personality. Ricky Nifo brings a remarkable old-school soul voice that recalls the emotional directness of Sam Cooke, while Juanita Tippins brings grit and fire to a dirty funk interpretation of Dolly Parton's mid-'70s track “Sure Thing.”

Then there's newcomer Xanthe Lorraine, whose voice sits beautifully inside the softer edges of Cowboy Simple's sound. Her performances on “Winter In Montana” and “Seven Year Ache” bring an understated quality to the songs — the sort of phrasing that doesn't need to push hard to get your attention.

That rotating collection of voices could easily have made the album feel like a compilation, but the musicians underneath it provide the thread. The pedal steel keeps drifting past. The electric piano keeps glowing in the corner. The rhythm section stays deep in the pocket. Guitars appear when they're needed and disappear when they're not.

Everything feels connected by the same imaginary radio station. Maybe that's the easiest way to understand Cowboy Simple.
It's somewhere around 1976. You're driving at night with the window cracked. The AM signal is fading in and out as you leave town. One minute there's country coming through the speakers, then southern soul, a little funk and something you can't quite identify.

You don't change the station. Because genre isn't really the point here. Good songs are.

And somewhere inside the Cowboy Simple universe, the pedal steel is crying, the Wurlitzer is humming and you can almost hear the vinyl crackle.