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- Genre: Rock/Pop
- Style: Singer-Songwriter
- Label: Lightning Rod Records / Thirty Tigers
Roots-rock with a lyrical bite.
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We Say...
The son of novelist Larry McMurtry initially made a critical splash with his 1989 debut and didn't quite toil in obscurity, as he spent the following decade and a half mastering the usages of roots-rock songwriting. But he didn't wrench his well-schooled craftsmanship into something uniquely powerful until the grim 2005 requiem for the American Dream, "We Can't Make It Here"; the excellent album from which it came, Childish Things, proved that McMurtry's rage had caused a dam-burst of creativity.
On his first disc since, he comes close to matching the bitter concision of "We Can't Make It Here" with either the Bush-belittling "Cheney's Toy" and the geopolitical "God Bless America" which, noting that S.U.V.s "don't run on love and peace," floats the theory that the US invasion of a certain Middle Eastern country might have been motivated, in some tiny way, by oil. And when his political insight falls short, some bristling guitars pick up the slack. The protest numbers also provide background context for McMurtry's tales of losers in life and love, particularly on the extended saga of "Ruby and Carlos," an older woman and a Gulf War I vet. And the title track, a drier and less raucous version of "Glory Days," follows its narrator from his nights kicking around half-assed teenage dreams with pals in a parking lot until ten years shy of retirement, when the dreams he kicks around sound no wiser or more likely.
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| 01. |  |
Bayou Tortous |
4:52 |
|
| 02. | |
Just Us Kids |
5:10 |
|
| 03. | |
God Bless America (pat mAcdonald must die) |
5:03 |
|
| 04. | |
Cheney's Toy |
5:51 |
|
| 05. | |
Freeway View |
3:39 |
|
| 06. | |
Hurricane Party |
5:58 |
|
| 07. | |
Ruby and Carlos |
6:37 |
|
| 08. | |
Brief Intermission |
2:53 |
|
| 09. | |
Fire Line Road |
5:32 |
|
| 10. | |
The Governor |
5:12 |
|
| 11. | |
Ruins of the Realm |
4:27 |
|
| 12. | |
You'd a' Thought |
5:17 |
|
| 13. | |
God Bless America
|
5:35 |
|
| 14. | |
We Can't Make It Here
|
7:28 |
|
| 15. | |
Restless
|
4:43 |
|
15 Total Tracks, 78:17 Total Length
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