Rolling Country 2006 Thread

Oops, no it's not. It's on When The Sun Goes Down, and was one of the most ignorable tracks there, too. As for whose version is better, it's a tossup. Why is such a mediocre song so popular? Weird.

Well, in my head right now, anyway. I should play them back to back sometime and see what happens. And yeah, I too assume MG would win.

And if it has a flat drum sound, as Edd argues, it has a flat drum sound -- Nothing old or new about flat drums. Not that I've noticed the charge applies here. (Though is Nashville production in general lass flat and undefined than it used to be? If so, maybe that's what Edd means. And he might have a point -- I'm definitely liking way more pop-country than I was 15 years ago, and production probably has plenty to do with that. Along with fewer wasted tracks, more rocking guitars, all the drummers from hard rock bands who moved south, smarter songwriting, etc. Though again, Chris Young's album still feels like 2006 to me, not 1991.) (Country CDs often do seem to sound less thin now, though part of that is probably just the nature of recording studio technology, I'm guessing.)

Still haven't listened to the MG alb. (At the listening post Brooke Hogan sounded surprisingly good in the background, given that her style seems modeled after the incurably blasé and bland Janet Jackson. Doesn't have a distinctive voice, but does at least have presence, and lots of pretty Storch sounds.) I've listened to relatively few albums this year, 'cause they're not coming in the mail in nearly the old quantity and anyway it's far more fun careening around YouTube than working my way through longplayers. My top albs are Marit, Paris, and Dixies, unless I want to include compilations, in which case Totally Country Vol. 5 and Crunk Hits Vol. 2 are up there. (The reason not to count the comps isn't that they're comps but that most of what's on them predates '06.) Anyway, I can easily imagine that there are ten better albums this year than my top three, but the way things are going with my "career" I'm not likely to hear them. Might vote for JoJo if I hear it again. Should relisten to the Electric Boogie Dawgz, which I got a kick out of. Gawd, if I'm struggling to reach 10 I'll even vote for last year's Electric Six (haven't heard this year's), which got its U.S. release in March. Missed my window of opportunity on Dierks at the listening party. Oh, I keep forgetting that Dylan had an album this year. Came out same time as Paris and so got overlooked in this odd neighborhood of ours. Not having heard a lick of it, I'd say it's the favorite so far to win Pazz & Jop, but that's just because no other obvious alternative candidate has stepped forward yet (at least as far as ignorant Frank knows). You guys have any opinion on Modern Times?

i'm supposed to write about kellie pickler. my m-gentry piece, w/ interview stuff from eddie, comes out online in the n-ville scene tomorrow.

and right, don, "lotta leavin'" is on the second dierks. I think I don't even have the first one any more. "that don't make it easy lovin' me" is one of my fave songs of the year, already, quite addictive. dierks should cover gene clark's "los angeles." I have been quite into clark's "no other" and that dillard and clark album, "fantastic expedition." my buddy dave duncan keeps telling me that "f.e." is the real start of country-rock not "gilded palace," but I think it's the real start of whatever these neo-bluegrass formalists in nashville like dierks are doing.

I dunno--the drum sound on chris young just doesn't strike me as a good drum sound. and I admit it, I really didn't give chris a full chance on first few listens. he can sing. I guess I feel as though the production doesn't surround him, that it's one-dimensional. my sense is that they were trying to sell the Voice and that's it, and maybe I'm wrong.

Nashville production has gotten way better in the last few years, but as Mark Nevers and others I've been fortunate enough to pick brains of have told me, there's an ungodly amount of compression going on in the mastering of most Music Row productions. That in my opinion is what makes something like Sara Evans' records so remarkable--they don't sound all squashed down. Brett Beavers' prod of the new Dierks sounds kinda like the last one, a bit trebly and a bit bass-light. This sounds like a conscious strategy to me.

Gary Bennett's record is so good partly because R.S. Field is so good a producer. Exemplary.

Big 50 Years of Steve Cropper thing happening at the Ryman on the first, which would've been my mother's 72nd birthday. with John Anderson, B.J. Thomas, John Kay, Mark Farner, and many others. If the TJ Martell Foundation will comp me the tix they promised (they're like $150, and I did a short thing on the show for the Scene, so gimme), I'll be there. Amazing to think Cropper started playing guitar in 1956 in Memphis, and he's still going--seen him a couple times out playing recently, and even when he's kinda fucking off he's still got that sound.

xps

...have only ONE album I etc. (aka Me and My Brother. Though maybe I should go back and listen to their debut Thug Walkin more one of these days. I also like the two remix sets My Brother and Me and USA Still United, and the side project Da Musicianz from this summer is finally growing on me, and there was a weird B-side EP I found a few years ago that was good too. So: One great album, one boring one, and a bunch of perfectly okay ones. But I still like my least favorite Montgomery Gentry album {their debut, I guess} more than my second favorite Ying Yang Twins album.)

Did anybody else notice that the new M-Gentry record has 1) really good graphics,

Weirder: The front cover of their new CD looks almost exactly the same as the back cover of their previous CD! (Maybe paintings based on the previous back cover's photographs, or something? Wacky!)

But that's all off-topic.

I never even knew this album existed until two days ago, when I was googling in an attempt to find out the weird audio EP (only playable in DVD players) (because mostly otherwise a DVD, as are the two outtake/remix albums) I mentioned above. It's Puttin' It In.

But yeah, way off topic. Unless you think Southern hip-hop and Ying Yangs in particular are "country" (some do, and not just Britney.)

I guess I'm in the minority on really liking alan jackson's "like red." just about everyone I've talked to dismisses it as sterile middlebrow airbrushed krauss-i-fication, but I just find it calming and even sort of inspired pop music. rich kienzle in the new no depression really takes it to task, "navel-gazing ballads score big with Bluebird Café types or dilettantes who derive their primary world view from NPR. One suspects damn few of these folks were ever Alan Jackson fans." OK, Rich is a good writer and I see his point, but I mean I get a lot of my world view from the monthly co-op newspaper (really, a well-done publication, excellent charts and photos of soybeans in all parts of Tenn., and some good recipes, plus great info about how farmers use Science, just like Alan and Alison use the Recording Studio to Make Music That Isn't Necessarily Last Year's Crop) and have nearly gotten myself kicked out the Bluebird because it can be so fucking boring. I don't get that the record is "arty" as Kienzle maintains--it's no artier than Dwight Yoakam anytime. For my part, I'd love to hear more people in Nashville doing exactly what Krauss does on this record; to some extent, Nevers is doing it, but within the context of "indie" or whatever with Lambchop, and his new Charlie Louvin record ought to be choice. In short, I have no problem with this kind of thing at all, I suppose I have some bad old Middlebrow in me. But I seem to be just about the only person who really likes this record, which for sure makes my top ten this year.
xps

I bought a Charlie Louvin LP, "It Almost Felt Like Love", recently (I'd always steered clear of his solo material, assuming it just wouldn't match up). It's surprisingly fine.

I haven't seen the whole review but that quote is maybe the most wreteched countrier-than-thou-ism I've ever read.

Excellent: Dierks doing "Fast Lanes and Country Roads" from "She Was Country When Country Wasn't Cool," and Brad Paisley "In Times Like These," where he sounds more lowdown, a bluesman even. For that matter, the banal hackery of some of the chord changes, very J.R. and Sue Ellen-pink, that anchor "I Was Country When Country Wasn't Cool" as done by K. Chesney and R. McEntire--that's pretty fucking middlebrow and cheesy, but the version is a good one, and useful historical perspective on the bad old '80s. Haven't heard "If Loving You Is Wrong, I Don't Wanna Be Right Yet" by dirty LeAnn Rimes; that might be for my tumbler o'bourbon and smoking jacket, later tonight.

Only ringer so far I've heard on "She Was Country" is Randy Owen doing "Years," that Fogleberg quaver, bearded ass-man in doleful extremis, I don't like it.

hi dere

In possibly related news, there's a glowing full-page review of the new Dierks Bentley album, of all things, in Paste, of all places, arguing that fans of alt-country shouldn't ignore Nashville country, which Geoffrey Himes says has gotten better in the past few years (though he may he overrate Bentley's importance in that equation -- Dierks is hardly the most interesting act in Nashville, though I agree he can frequently be real good -- and Himes mentions the Wrights and Bobby Pinson but not Big & Rich or Toby Keith or Montgomery Gentry as evidence of his claim, which strikes me as somewhat odd). Nice to see the barrier being broken down, regardless.

A lot of what alt-country is, to me, it's just bar music, music you hear in a bar, intellectualized bar music, whatever, and having to worry about my relationship to the supposedly "authentic" or not, is wearying to me and fucks up my thinking and writing. So I don't do it, but I think ND honestly tries to get at some of that stuff and that there might well be something in the effort that I am either too rooted or not rooted enough to fully appreciate. It's just a bar--let's have a drink.

Glad to see that Himes gives country its due; by my lights, Dierks Bentley is a classic case of a pretty good artist whose overall production-design is flawed. Kinda like a pretty good and perfectly good-looking but not spectacularly beautifuly actress who never quite gets lighted the right way on set. What I find interesting about Dierks' last 2 is the utter banality of the whole thing, when you set the sometimes kind of brilliant *conception* of the *sound, playing and production* itself against the, to my ears, deflating *sententiousness* of the sentiments themselves. In other words, the whole ramblin' thing makes me urp, and the point of those records is a) the fact he's got this unruly head of curls, no hat (and MG are significant not least because Eddie wears his big hat/duster and Troy doesn't, and that's the contrast, exactly what they try to do in their music, whereas Dierks is all No Hat) b) the one great trick Brett Beavers has come up with re DB--using this four-four kick-drum stomp to ground some really interesting guitar licks by the great J.T. Corenflos and the surgically applied banjo and the occasional really cool lick as in "That Don't Make It Easy Lovin' Me," which is I think the only great song on the record, just like "Lot of Leavin'" which it rewrites was the only great one on the last one. I find the 4/4 kick a bit intrusive after a while, altho on this one the drummer often does a kind of roll suggestive of some Civil War memory or some forgotten road memory or whatever, and that adds to the whole thing. And the songs are mostly non-songs, actually, and the one where Dierks imagines an egalitarian heaven with the usual post-hobo-sentimental cast of characters, is downright fulsome. Plus, as on "Modern Day Drift," the production itself is wrong, both these records sound like they were just digitally moved around and flattened out, they lack depth. Too compressed. And that's what I find mystifying about country music and some of the writing about it, why not talk about the record as artifice and get into why they sound the way they do? As on Jackson or as on MG, which sounds fucking great. I kind of wish they'd work on their harmonies a bit more, or do something with background voices that wasn't just using some gospel choir, which has become just as much empty signifier as mariachi horns in country music.

Anyway, Dierks just needs a new producer, and god forgive me, but he needs to record somewhere else than Nashville, perhaps. It's obvious that Brett Beavers (who cowrites nearly every song on the record w/ Dierks and one/two others) has created this sound that is supposed to go with a ramblin' persona, and it half-works. And that songs are written piecemeal and by committee to fit into that sound. I'll stop here: Dierks, to my mind, isn't all that interesting as a person or a "star," but the whole process by which he makes records is real interesting and indicative of what can be wrong with how they make records on Music Row these days. And that most of the records made around here sound fucking great.

xps

Oh, good, then I can snatch some time to listen to the Brooke Hogan instead (not a distinctive voice, but for r&b riffiness and catchiness she beats a lot of more distinctive singers, e.g. her producer's gf Janet Jackson).

(Haven't visited the PO in a couple of days; the package with the Mandrell trib arrived, as has the one with the Alan Jackson and the Cornerstone mixes. A couple of mix CDs are on their way to you.)

"Redder That That" - "Redder Than That"

Wasn't the MG album I sent in the same package as the Mandrell one? Weird. I only sent you two packages; should've been in one of those! Unless for some ridiculous reason I forgot to put in in the envelope.

Went back and listened to the MG album yesterday, after Don's and Frank's skepticism about it on this thread, and it's as great as I thought. Only song I could live without is "If You Wanna Keep An Angel," I think. I'll concede that there may not be a "Cold One Comin' On" on here, but who cares -- "Hey Country" (with that cool Stooges chord progression or whatever it is at the start! Though okay, the "lookit that cowboy hat" Alan Jackson reference gets on my nerves, though I think it's supposed to be a joke), "Lucky Man," "Takes All Kinds," "Your Tears Are Comin" (= "96 Tears"/"Who's Crying Now"), "Clouds" (which I didn't get, I admit, til everybody started loving it here), "Twenty Years On" (has any act ever sung better about not getting along with their dads? Probably, but these guys are way up there), "What Do Ya Think About That," "Redder Than That" (great high school reunion song, the "red" stuff is just extraneous gravy), "A Man's Job," and "Free Life in the Fast Lane" all kick my ass. The latter always makes me think of that South Park movie song about "Freedom Isn't Free" more than it makes me think of the Eagles, but damn does it rock -- what's really hitting me about this record is how southern-rock-*expansive* so much of its music sounds; they really sound like a *band* these days. Which I guess maybe they always did, but that doesn't mean I can't be surprised when it happens again (and maybe more). Also, the spoken word sections in I think "Free Ride In the Fast Lane" and especially "Twenty Years On" (I *think* those are the tracks they're in) blow me away every time. And these guys have never sounded as open-hearted and even *happy* as they do on this record (happy even if life does give them a pound of pain for every ounce of pleasure or whatever it is they say); they've never made as many jokes, and the jokes can be really funny! Anyway, the moral platitudes they spout (or remember their dads spouting, usually) are just one very small part of the mix. And nobody else in music now rocks with a comparable immediacy. In my book, it's still the album of the year.

And the MG record, I guess the whole thing works fine as "album" and as a canny reinterp of their *own* image. Still bad-ass but adding some backstory and their own songs which of course derive from all their hard-earned experience to the mix; and I kind of am nonplussed by the spoken-word shit except on "Hey Country" where the duo show a nice feel for the dumb-ass enthusiasm of southern stoners. But I mean they're pop pros (them, their producers, and their songwriters) and it's indeed post-Big & Rich in Nashville. They're one of the few big acts to even try to do the same thing, right? So in the end I think "Clouds" is pretty much a dog, "Redder Than That" is a great idea (right, the redneckery is just a red herring) but isn't quite there. I'm forever a skeptic about Nashville songwriting and a lot of this just seems *almost* real good but almost always too...banal, or something like that. But it's high-grade and you definitely have to enter their universe and all that. (I mean, hearing "Some People Change" on the radio around here, they're promoting the shit out of the record on radio, MG tailgate parties, Meet Us in Lexington, Kentucky, "rednecking and ready to have a good time," and you do get a sense of how ambitious they are, with that single, which I think ultimately gets over on that big chorus of Many Colors on the last "SOME PEOPLE CHANGE," and you think, that's what good about country music--the people.