The Lost Trailers
“Holler Back”
(BNA)
Luke Bryan
“Country Man”
(Capitol Nashville)
If Big & Rich sought to revolutionize Nashville country by
injecting it with, among other things, hiphop, it sort of worked. Not
that Big & Rich have done anything particularly worthwhile since
their debut, but if nothing else, they helped usher rap slang into
Music Row.
On “Holler Back,” Lost Trailers vocalist/songwriter Geoffrey Stokes
Nielson sings about a hip-hoppified friend who calls himself “E. Diddy,
but his name is Earl”: “He says things like, ‘Dog, are you down with
that?’/And ‘Don’t that fly girl got some back?’/And I feel so doggone
out of place.” The singer proudly declares that the only “holler back”
he knows is a place in the Deep South that his friend is (a) from, and
(b) should return to, pronto. Of course, this brazenly ignores the fact
that anyone who makes a record this processed-sounding plainly knows
more about the hiphop-leaning modern world than he’s letting on. The
song is not that subtle, I know, and given how overpumped the Georgia
quintet’s music is, that’s probably appropriate.
Luke Bryan’s approach isn’t exactly subtle—”Country Man”
traffics, knowingly, in redneck cliché. But its relatively
laid-back groove whomps, and Bryan gets laughs while still proving its
point. Not only can he “grow [his] own groceries and salt-cure a ham,”
he also gets off the best line of the year so far by beseeching the
fine young thing with whom he’s about to make out in his vehicle, “Your
little iPod’s loaded down with Hoobastank/Don’t be a tape-player hater,
girl, we’re grooving to Hank.”
Reba McEntire
and Kenny Chesney
“Every Other Weekend”
(MCA Nashville)
How shameless a tearjerker is this? Its premise is a couple who hide
pangs of still-consuming desire for one another-—which, of
course, each is convinced has been snuffed in the other—trading
their children for visits. It’s middle-class pathos at its corniest,
loaded with bathetic strings and pianos. And the lyric is so particular
that when Kenny and especially Reba sing the living shit out of it, you
don’t care. First time through, the convincer is Kenny’s tender
rendering of the lines about spending time with his kids, watching
“Movies on the sofa/Grilled cheese and cut the crust off,” which is
overwhelmed (a good term to use, overall, when discussing this record)
when Reba reads her final line (“God, I wish that he was still with me
again”) with the unforced agony that’s made her Country’s #1 Song
Saleswoman for however long now. You could resist this, but then you’d
be wearing too much armor. 