Kasey Chambers brings her Australian brand of country to Knuckleheads Friday

It’s been a while since I listened to Autralian country musician Kasey Chambers, but I’m glad I played her latest record, a just-released double album called Dragonfly. It’s rare to get an album with 10 good songs, much less 20, but Dragonfly delivers across every track, with much to please any fan of roots or pop or just damn good music. It’s exactly the sort of disc that makes a lapsed fan sit up, take notice and wonder what else he’s been missing the past decade.

I was aware of her acclaimed debut, The Captain, but it wasn’t until her 2001 sophomore album, Barricades & Brickwalls, that I got onboard. That album was a supremely catchy mixture of country and rock, balancing the plaintive cry of “Not Pretty Enough” with “A Little Bit Lonesome” and its honky-tonk swing, and the powerful “Crossfire,” featuring the rockabilly stomp of the Living End.

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Follow-up Wayward Angel took three years to come and was pretty good, but I missed 2006’s Carnival. Her first collaboration with Shane Nicholson, Rattlin’ Bones, grabbed my attention, but after that, Chambers’ music kind of fell outside of my scope of vision.

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This is a roundabout way of explaining that I’ve made a terrible mistake, and Dragonfly only serves to drive that point home in a definitive way. Keith Urban and Ed Sheeran are present, as are a slew of award-winning Australian musicians. Case in point: The first disc was produced by ARIA Hall of Famer Paul Kelly, while the second was produced by Chambers’ brother Nash.

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A double album can be a sticky thing, full of bloat or failing to make use of the talent at hand, but Dragonfly is loaded top to bottom with songs that demonstrate Chambers’ range, wit and verve. The “Talkin’ Baby Blues” is a self-deprecatingly hilarious story of Chambers’ life and rise as a musician, even going so far as to reference Chambers’ first big hit, “Not Pretty Enough,” with a tossed off “Am I not pretty enough? Who gives a fuck?”

It’s preceded by the massive “Romeo & Juliet,” which features the line “meet me at the church if you’ll die for me.” It’s a song Lucinda Williams would be proud to call her own, but Chambers makes it into something like a cross between an English folk ballad and an arena-worthy pop ballad, and it’s positively mixtape-worthy.

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The title track is a gorgeous, string-accented chamber-pop number, with finger-picked acoustic guitar grounding the lushness. Not that the second disc needs it: Chambers’ brother Nash’s production keeps the back half of Dragonfly rootsy, with quite a few round-singing numbers, a blues dirge in “If I Died,” and a pretty traditional duet in Chambers’ song with Keith Urban, “If We Had a Child.”

This is all a way to convince you to throw down your money and go see Chambers when she plays Knuckleheads on Friday, June 16, because Dragonfly is the sort of musical delight one needs to reward with cold hard cash. Per the folks who keep track of set lists and the like online, it appears that Chambers plays a little bit from all her albums, so maybe I can play catch-up on the songs I missed.

Kasey Chambers plays Knuckleheads with Julian Davis & the Hay-Burners and Garrett Kato on Friday, June 16. Details here.