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John Cowan - New Tattoo
- Yeehaw! This collection of good ol’ country strumming and hollering proves you can take any old boring conversation and make it a country ballad. Take the song, “Carla’s Got a New Tattoo,” which spins and weaves like a machine-gun gossip thread about piercing, body-art and their physiological side-effects on one’s appearance. Fascinating stuff, but it doesn’t follow this path long. Some of the songs are easily lumped into the mold of default hand-clapping, knee-slapping blue grass rushes, but when Cowan takes a breathe he proves his mettle.
Songs like “Misery and Happiness,” with Cowan’s pained lyrics and a few electric instruments smuggled into the studio, play out like alternative country rock. Those are good moments, but sadly they are too few and far between to entirely overshadow the album’s problems. I can’t help but think that this guy is less at home with the alternative fare, which is too bad because it just feels somehow less silly than hearing him singing about “Working in the New Mine” like some bona-fide blue-collar hero. This guy just doesn’t seem very reliable when he spins such a happy-go-lucky yarn about the men who work in the mines and the woman who work the men who work in the mines. That kind of stuff might play well at Dollywood (Dolly Parton’s fabulous theme park that she bulldozed her idyllic Appalachian hometown to construct), but it’s just too much of a forced construction for me to accept.
Reviewer: Alexander Rogers
new
Reviewer's Rating: 5.5
Reader's Rating: 10.00
Reader's Votes: 2
Added: 14-May-2006
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