COWBOY JUNKIES The Trinity Session (RCA)

Country music has got to be the most scoffed-at genre in popular music today. A victim of Yankee elitist snobbery, it has been continually attacked for its "simplistic musicianship" and "corny lyrics" by high-tech, emotionally constipated northerners with a numbing sort of class-conscious country club arrogance.

But these griping highbrows miss the point. Country music isn't about Eddie Van Halenisms or clever, Morrissey-esque wordplay - it's about feeling. Simplicity and unabashed sentimentality are the down home virtues that allow country to achieve an emotional purity unrivaled by any other style of music. This is why nothing tugs at your heart like a good country ballad.

Cowboy Junkies is a country band from Canada that really digs the Velvet Underground. The band even covers the Velvets' classic "Sweet Jane" on The Trinity Session, its second album. And singer Margo Timmins' luminous croon is gently cloaked by somber, ghostly music, resulting in a sublime murk reminiscent of V.U.'s "Candy Says" and "Pale Blue Eyes." The band (Alan Anton on bass, brothers Michael and Peter Timmins on guitar and drums, respectively) creates songs out of brittle electric guitar chords and smokey, lilting bass-and-drum rhythms, also in the Velvet Underground tradition. The result is a gentle and uniquely beautiful music rooted in country and transformed by a minimalist rock sensibility.

The first side of The Trinity Session features some ballads that can catch you with your guard down and make you cry on a lonely Saturday night. This is true of the traditional, a cappella "Mining for Gold" ("I feel like I'm dying from mining for gold") and "Misguided Angel," which plaintively declares that love is not perfect and neither are lovers.

"Sister, don't you understand / He's all I ever wanted in a man? / I'm tired of sitting 'round the t.v. every night / Hoping I'm finding a 'Mr. Right.' "

"To Love is to Bury," which closes side one, is a sad tale of marriage broken by a husband's suicide. The song's lyrics are brilliant, linking its images poetically and then tying them together in the last verse.

"They say love is to bury / The demons from which we all hide / But tonight by this river, 'neath this willow tree / Becoming one with earth and sky."

Although this lyric sample can't be fully appreciated without the rest of the song to provide its context, it does suggest the tune's poignancy.

Margo Timmins is a captivating singer. Her sweet, sultry voice injects the songs with a frank emotional power. And she does this without affecting a phony southern accent a la Mick Jagger. When Timmins sings a line like "I'm so lonesome I could cry," her voice is a frail, naked expression and you believe her. She never oversings or resorts to any kind of vocal ploys to gain the listener's sympathy - she lets her soft, tender voice stand on its own, which gives it infinitely more emotional strength than an overwrought Taylor Dane vocal. Even if you deliberately try to ignore it, Timmins' voice has a way of wafting into you consciousness.

Throughout The Trinity Session, guest musicians crop up and color the songs with fiddles, mandolins, harmonicas, pedal steel guitars and other traditional instruments. This added instrumentation is quiet and supportive, complementing the music without ever dominating it.

A great example of this is Jaro Czerwinec's accordion solo on the Junkies' cover of "Walking After Midnight," a bluesy, atmospheric raunch. His vaporous, Augustus Pablo-styled solo doesn't sound like a featured "special guest" appearance, but sounds like a band member just playing along, never ignoring the feel of the song or dashing into egotistic forays of flashy virtuosity.

The Trinity Session contains a generous amount of covers, all performed with great reverence and sincerity by the Junkies. The Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane" is the best of these, taken at a languid tempo and picking up where the song's lyric left off.

"If anyone had a heart / They wouldn't turn around and break it / And if anyone played a part / They wouldn't turn around and hate it."

"Sweet Jane" is a great choice for the Junkies' first single from The Trinity Session. Here's hoping it does well and is followed by a broken-hearted original like "Misguided Angel" or "To Love is to Bury," because Cowboy Junkies are a band that needs to be heard. They remind the listener that it's necessary to break loose from the whirlwind of life's non-emotional concerns in order to sit back and really feel something for a change. Country music is a great agent of this raw emotion, full of teary tales of the forlorn souls we all feel like at times. With this in mind, maybe Cowboy Junkies can restore country music's dignity among the rock audience north of the Mason-Dixon line. It's about time it happened.