Praise the Lord!! If you're disgusted with wading through empty "hat acts" on Country radio, lament no more. Gary Allan may indeed have a hat, but his pure, thrillingly unglossy Country songs show he's not ACT-ing like he's a young upstart on the way to being a legend himself someday. He's the real thing!

This follow up to Gary's well-received debut, "Used Heart for Sale," is
such a colossally refreshing island of stunning work in an ocean of albums from mediocre, interchangeable, wannabe cowboys, that a reviewer could be in danger of running out of superlatives. His recent hit single is the opening title track, which combines his irresistible voice with the interesting and intelligent wordplay that marked his earlier hit, "Her Man."

His next released single, "No Man In His Wrong Heart," does what
country does best and does so little of these days - tell a soap opera epic, and gripping story of denying a loose woman, in three minutes. Listen to "Don't Leave Her Lonely Too Long," and see if you think Mr. Allan isn't possessed by a still-living Buck Owens. "I'll Take Today" and "I Ain't Runnin' Yet" take that Buck Owens, Bakersfield sound, and meld it to modern country Ballad-ism. Not only do the seams not show, Gary makes the songs into gems, with twenty times the depth of your usual empty Country cry-in-your-beer whining.

Big time kudos for Gary's irresistible cover of Conway Twitty's "She
Loves Me, She Don't Love You." He takes Conway's 60's honky tonk ditty, adds a Jimmy Buffett/Eddy Raven-like dance beat behind it, and makes an expert song that has #1 written all over it. (How many empty frat-boy-come-cowboys even KNOW a Conway Twitty song?) "I've got a Quarter In my Pocket" rocks us back to Buck Owens land again, while the somewhat whiny "Baby I will," co-penned by the artist himself, is the album's first song even approaching a lessening of quality.

Still, this album towers over so many other current ones in the field, that the album's "bad" song could easily be some lesser artist's blockbuster. "Red Lips, Blue Eyes, Little White Lies" is an incredibly catchy honky-tonk party song, even if its lyrics are a tad creaky in comparison with some of the country-poetry chestnuts this dandy disc contains. For the next song, "It Took Us All Night Long to Say Goodbye," the bad news is that Gary stops channeling Buck Owens. The good news is he starts channeling Merle Haggard! And for the penultimate track, "Forgotten, But Not Gone," there's nothing to say but that it's magic. How can a song about a woman who feels more lonely staying with her estranged husband than she would if she left, that contains the dynamite lyric "It's better to be gone but not forgotten, than to be forgotten but not gone," be anything LESS than magic?

I wanted to hate the bonus track, "No Judgment Day," for fear that
many country weepers about violent crime get too damn preachy, but instead this song, which is sort of the other, slower side of "The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia," is at once chilling and heart-wrenching.

All the silly folks in Nashville who think that making carbon copies
of pseudo-cowboy pop songs are the way to critical success are wrong. THIS album shows what everyone should be running to copy and emulate. Everyone who wants to make a country album that could be well on its way to being a modern classic, take a listen, and then take a lesson. This folks, is how to do it!