Reader Recommendations: Steers & Stripes

now playing: Brad Paisley - Online

This begins the reader recommendations I mentioned on Monday. This album comes to me from my good friend Kia over at Typo Away, who was kind enough to provide me with (I believe the term is) a metric buttload of possibilities, and all I had to do was ask. I think I'll be set for a while, but that shouldn't stop anyone from recommending more music to me. Just leave a comment and I'll add it to my queue.

Now, incredibly long-time readers (we're talking first entry here) might recall me saying that as a rule, I do not like country music. So far, this has held strong, though I must admit the occasional Brad Paisley song is pretty damn catchy. This is largely because in my experience, as the opening track of Brooks & Dunn's 2001 album Steers & Stripes backs up, there might as well only be one country song with a bunch of different lyrics to it. "Only in America" is certainly inspirational, and I appreciate that it pulls off a sense of national pride without drowning the listener in images of Americana, but the instrumentation sounds almost identical to every other country song I've heard. The same remains true of "Go West", slightly later in the album, and "When She's Gone, She's Gone", which also gives us the requisite metaphor of a woman being like something in America -- in this case, the Mississippi River.

I am pleased to say that this trend does not continue, with songs like "The Last Thing I Do" and "Good Girls Go to Heaven" bringing to mind southern rock along the lines of Lynyrd Skynyrd or, more recently, the Ghost Hounds. The album's first ballad, "The Long Goodbye", is no doubt heartfelt, but outside of the closing guitar solo, it still sounds generic to me. I was impressed with "My Heart is Lost to You", which would best be described as a Tex-Mex song: It uses Spanish guitar and salsa drums, but maintains a country feel and overall reminds me a little of Carlos Santana. "Ain't Nothing 'Bout You" struck me as a bit of an odd song, but not particularly in a bad way. I mean no offense to Mssrs. Brooks and Dunn by this, but the backing band sounded (to me) that it had been lifted from a late-90s Backstreet Boys song. It has a bit of a manufactured quality to it, as though it's trying to sound like a pop song when it clearly shouldn't be. I can't really argue with the numbers, though; it was the number one country single of 2001, so I guess it worked.

The second half of the album soon follows with "Unloved", another generic-sounding ballad, but this time it has a backing chorus. Immediately after is "Deny, Deny, Deny", which has help from a xylophone and more Spanish guitar to tell a bit of a talking blues life story. From a musical standpoint, the chorus sounds unfinished, not coming to a clear resolution where it would normally be expected. That's entering nitpick territory, I think. Let's continue. "Lucky Me, Lonely You" has two false starts that are probably intended to add some familiarity to the recording, but all it did was confuse me. "I Fall" is another slow and non-noteworthy ballad, which leads into "Every River", a mid-tempo love song with cliché lyrics, but as they say, clichés are such because they work. Worth mentioning are the hand drums and Hammond organ in the band, keeping it just interesting enough to hold my attention. The album closes with a more than welcome southern rock song, "See Jane Dance", with lyrics and guitar solos that would fit in perfectly on a .38 Special album.

I know there's a lot of negativity in the above paragraphs, but truth be told, I enjoyed a decent part of this album. It isn't anything I would listen to voluntarily all the way through, but I can definitely see myself adding some single tracks to my regular rotation. I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of twang in this album. I'm constantly worried that country songs will be too twangy (which I realize is like saying "this salt is too salty" or "this Dragonforce solo is too wanky"), so this album definitely exceeded my expectations. Overall, I would call this album average, but I'm proud to say that this album has shattered my preconceptions of what country music can be. Between plateaus of straight-up country, there are valleys of near-lifeless ballads, but they're almost completely offset by peaks of inventive southern rock. And I will never say no to southern rock. B-