Laurence Mackinreviews Ryan Binghamat Whelan's in Dublin

Ryan Bingham has all the trappings a good country singer needs. He's got the rough and raw upbringing, having roamed the towns of west Texas and New Mexico from an early age, working on the ramshackle rodeo circuit.

Despite being barely 25 years old, he's got a voice coarse as desert sand, which sounds like it's been sat rusting in the corner of a junkyard for years. And for this gig he even had the lumberjack shirt with the rhinestone buttons, the road-weary acoustic guitar, and the cowboy hat that's good for tipping at the ladies.

What he doesn't have is a whole lot of originality. Bingham's songs are all in a similar mid-tempo vein, stories of travelling into Tulsa, learning lessons on the road, and frantic trips across the Mexican border. These are all well-worn paths, and plenty of people have trod these country highways and byways before and left their mark.

Bingham's contributions to the canon, the blue-collar chorus of Dollar a Day and the Mexican inflections of Boracho Station, were no doubt earned at the hard-living country coalface, and his band, the Dead Horses, are solid enough players, with guitarist and mandolin player Corby Schaub the stand-out musician.

However, bass player Jeb Venable looks like he is on loan from the Dandy Warhols, and the Dead Horses feel more like a rock band playing country than a rockin' little combo from the Guitar Town. The songs don't shuffle and sway the way they should and, apart from a few sporadic flourishes, the band don't push and pull each other on stage. Bingham's vocal is the focus, a heavy, hulking, rasping thing, but it's never pushed too hard and its edges are never razor-sharp.

This was a well-received gig, with plenty of enthusiasm from the crowd (especially the ladies, who all seemed to be looking for a little hat-tipping), though it was hard to imagine there were too many Townes Van Zandt fans among them. We might have to wait a few weeks for Steve Earle to roll into town before we get some country music to set the room on fire.