Big & Rich - Between Raising Hell & Amazing Grace

Artist : Big & Rich

Album Title : Between Raising Hell & Amazing Grace

Genre : Country/Pop (and a lot more)

Rating : ***** *½ (out of 10*)

This Week I'm Listening To...
Big & Rich burst onto the Country/Pop scene in 2004 with Horse Of A Different Color. Now they're back with their 3rd (or 4th if you include an EP release a couple years ago) album.

Type-casting B&R is difficult. Here's some of the genres listed for them at Rate Your Music : Country; Country-Pop; Contemporary Country; Folk (huh?); Outlaw Country; Country-Rock; Progressive Country (isn't that an oxymoron?); Country-Rap; Death-Country (wazzat?); and Metal-Country (I don't think so).

You can add to that list Country-Gospel; Country-Humorous (think Roger Miller, not Ray Stevens); and last but not least, Country-Wedding.

What's To Like...
Good vocals and good harmony. "Rich" of B&R is John Rich, who used to sing in the group Lonestar.

Variety. You know how the songs on a Country album all sound the same? Not here. Every song is of a different genre.

The opening track (Lost In The Moment) is destined to be played at every cowgirl's wedding for the next 10 years.

And the third track (Faster Than Angels Fly), my favorite, is a thoughtful ballad akin to Springsteen's "Incident on 57th Street" and Dire Straits' "Romeo & Juliet".

What's Not To Like...
Think "Lite". As in Country-Lite; Rap-Lite; Gospel-Lite Rock-Lite; etc. There's a lot of breadth-of-genres here, but not a lot of depth.

Think "Mellow". These guys postured themselves on HOADC as a party band. Don't put this one on to liven up your next get-together. Pull out some of your old Hank Williams Jr. stuff instead. Indeed, the cover of AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long" is just ...um... wrong. That's Liz's opinion, and she gets the final say on all AC/DC covers.

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Chaw...
In the end, Big & Rich are singers. If you dropped Simon & Garfunkel into a vat of Country-&-Western, they'd come out sounding like this. There is some good guitar work here, but it's never allowed to go for more than about three bars before it gets pushed into the background again.

And singers, even the best ones, are only as good as the songs someone writes for them. You may love classic Paul Simon from 30-40 years ago, but the stuff he's putting out today (see his 2006 release "Surprise") is just boring. Somewhere along the line, he lost the ability to write/sing songs that up and grab you.

A lot of the songs here are quite good, even if they're not particularly lively. But there are some banal lyrics as well. Here's a line from the "When The Devil Gets The Best Of Me" track : "Sometimes women are like cocaine; Got to have 'em more & more every day". Or how 'bout "You never stop loving somebody; You just start loving somebody else" from the same-titled track? Yucko!

It will be interesting to see what kind of longevity Big & Rich will have. According to their fans, they've gone downhill since the debut album. That's not a good sign. A medicore cross-genre band isn't gonna get played by any radio station. Just ask Don McLean.