WASHINGTON—Country’s most exciting new act isn’t from Nashville, but from Nullarbor Plain. 
When her father decided to become a fox hunter, Australia’s Kasey Chambers spent her first decade in the wilds of the Outback, eating freshly killed rabbit and kangaroo, sleeping in a Toyota Land Cruiser and learning country and western music around the campfire. 

The result is a vibrant 25-year-old phenomenon gifted enough to lead a lost genre out of the wilderness of pop-flavored blandness and help it rediscover its own lost heart and soul. 

Chambers held a reverent crowd at the 9:30 Club spellbound Tuesday night with a mix of material from her new album “Barricades and Brickwalls” and her debut CD “The Captain.” 

Her father, Bill Chambers, plays guitar in her band. 

Chambers wore a black jump suit and had her hair pinned up unselfconsciously. She is noticeably pregnant with a child due in May, and she joked that she didn’t know where to hold her guitar anymore. 

Tuesday night’s highlights included the new album’s “Not Pretty Enough,” a song she said was inspired by thinking about “Britney Spears being played on every radio station in the world and me being played on none,” and “We’re All Gonna Die Some day.” 

The low point of the evening was a ponderous solo of “Ignorance,” a hidden track on “Barricades and Brickwalls” inspired by a music writer who told her there has to be something wrong with anyone who’s not angry about what’s going on in the world. 

Chambers said this caused her to wonder if she was shallow because she’s happy. The product of that needless self-doubt is an ill-considered Joan Baez impression. 

Kasey Chambers doesn’t need to heed music writers. She is a skilled songwriter and the rare kind of talent that can rivet an audience. 

After all, she packed the house on a night when D.C. was on highest alert because of a terror ist attack warning. 

Opening act Matthew Ryan is also a truly great songwriter. But lacking Chambers’ sizzle, he can become a little tedious as a solo acoustic artist. Unfortunately, he’s not doing well enough commercially to afford a backup band for a gig like this. 

Ryan is a cult figure within the brother- and sisterhood of music artists. And the Philadelphia native said that the way his career is going, the only way he gets to tour is when fellow artists who are admirers, like Chambers, ask him to open for them. Too bad for Ryan. And too bad for us. 

—Michael Zitz