A great crowd showed up on a Monday night to get “popped” in the face by Brett Kissel and One More Girl’s take on country music, Feb. 10 at Averag
e Joes.
While I missed the first two acts of the Young Guns tour stop in Lethbridge including Jordan McIntosh as the show actually started early at 8 p.m., I arrived in time for a rollicking, incendiary set from rising Juno nominated country star Brett Kissel.
He kicked things into high great with a couple of newer songs “ She Knows What She Likes” and the popular “Girl In A Cowboy Hat,” which had a lot of cowboy hatted girls in the audience cheering.
He talked about growing up on a northeastern Alberta cattle ranch and told stories which were mostly lost in reverb drenched vocals. He told a story about “having a heart to heart” with George Strait and getting positive feedback about Kissel’s song “Country In My Blood,” which he played before launching into a new song “Do What You Want.”
His old friend and mentor Trevo
r Panczak joined him on stage to show some of the roots of country music by playing a cover of Waylon Jennings’ “Good Hearted Woman.”
Kissel sounded fantastic.
He played some new songs and all of his hits, including “Raise Your Glass,” which lead to a brief set of strong covers of Queen's “We Will Rock You,” Garth Brooks’ “Baton Rouge” and “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.”
He ended his brief set with his biggest hit “It Started With A Song” and was joined by One More Girl who added extra harmonies then took over the stage, backed by Kissel’s band.
One More Girl were in more of a pop and rock mindset, than a country mind though they played their hits and a few new songs from their brand new EP. They sang beautiful pop melodies and harmonized superbly together.
One More Girl played a medley of their own hits and another set of one hit wonder ’90s hits including “ One Headlight,” “Mr. Jones” and “Semi-Charmed Life.”
The girls have definitely matured into young women by adding a few more mature songs including their new single “about drinking” and by playing my favourite cover was of Matraca Berg’s “Back In the Saddle.”
Kissel came back to end the show with the girls by playing an eyebrow furrowing encore of modern pop hits including including Robin Thicke's twerking song “Good Girl” and a cover of “Good Night” by the Black Eyed Peas
