Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

I don’t know what it is, but I can hardly ever give an unbiased review for a country album.  There’s just something about getting some earnest rock sent my way amidst a sea of pretense and hip-ness that I just can’t deny babying.  Is it always deserved; the warm approach I take to country?  Not always, it would seem.  However, I write these reviews honestly and I feel I just needed to state that I embrace country just a tad easier, with just a little more allowance, than I do other genres.  It’s not that I don’t hold it to a higher standard, it’s just that the genre need not stand on the shoulders of achievement.  It’s just there for the people.  Take it if you will.  Reject it if you will.  There really isn’t ever any technical dazzling that goes down in country, and I doubt that’s what these artists are striving for (although some contemporaries like Emerson Drive can really tear it up).  I’d believe they base their merits on how well they get that maudlin, worn in, and sometimes overlooked everyday thought across about everyday things.  The subjects of the songs are sometimes as silly as pets; trucks; and picnics, or as profound as first love; death; and uncertainty.  Even though country is an everyday kind of music, it’s amazing the breadth of things that can happen any and every day.

Chris Cagle delivers again with that “Nashville sound” that all the country purists want to complain about.  Well, complain away I say.  You purists wouldn’t be nearly as intriguing if it weren’t for the “Motown country” that takes up most the airwaves.  And since it does, we best learn to appreciate some of it or we might as well go see if Hank Williams III is looking to adopt.  I like Hank Williams III, but I also like Chris Cagle and what I hear here on My Life's Been a Country Song.

Chris Cagle sends his album off with What Kinda Gone that has the simple wit and playfulness of a Beatles tune.  The idle debating of semantics involving a girlfriend’s ultimatum is the right kind of common sense paroxysm to get the ball rolling with a number of whimsical numbers, and the occasional foray into heavier subject matter.  In all this, My Life's Been a Country Song starts with a good sense of character, and a sense of place and time that lands elsewhere by the end of the album.  And, well, I think that right there is a good mark of a country album.  It sort of moves you without moving too much. 

The album, in my opinion, hits its peak with Never Ever Gone, a ditty about rebounding from an important relationship.  The song hits all the standard dynamics that a mid-tempo, country love song should hit and still manages to squeeze in some of that obvious, but constantly overlooked, observation on how people have the darndest time “getting that feeling licked”.  Simple delivery.  Simple phrasing.  Simple shifts.  And like any good country song it transcends the feeling of “simple” and evokes profound changes in mood.  For some of you that are less forgiving with country, this change of mood might be for the worse.  For me, it’s a change towards the introspective.  This sounds cheesy and artificial, but it’s not.  I can’t really defend it properly so I won’t even try.  Anybody that can incorporate the non-sexual expression of “getting something licked” into their rhetoric is gold in my book.  Well, except for some politicians out there.  Once again, I think I’m demonstrating how I expect very little.

But for how little I expect from my country, that doesn’t mean that I don’t give a critical green light to My Life's Been a Country Song.  It lands pitch perfect in Tim McGraw territory and really augments that “Motown country” trend that’s been rolling steady for the last 20 years out of Nashville.  Chris Cagle earns his daisy-duked groupies on this one.  The album’s a breeze of down-home goodness that comes and goes as quickly as the “first loves” of so many country songs.

Listen to What Kind of Gone, Never Ever Gone, and My Life’s Been a Country Song.  I know a lot of girls lying dreamy eyed on their beds across America are.  And you guys may be asking how this statement really does anything but destroy credibility with my criticism here.  Well, I don’t know about that, but I do know that this is the stuff your girls are listening to when they’re “really” thinking about you.  Might as well get used to being framed in country songs.  It’s a scientific fact.  We only wish girls thought about us when they listened to AC/DC.