Sean Stemaly – 4 Wheel High
Ernest put out a 26-track album last week, which is far too long to sit through in one sitting. That’s the whole point, and it is led by the market: if nobody listens to albums and prefers individual tracks, why not serve people a collection of them on a platter and let them be guided by their own instincts?
The EP is the other way of doing things, a short burst of five or six tracks which showcase every aspect of an act’s sound without any filler. In any case, if such an act has a support slot to a main act, they only need eight songs tops, and some of them are covers.
Sean Stemaly’s new EP 4 Wheel High has five tracks on it, produced by the fantastically named Lex Lipsitz who signed Sean to his Lex Music Group label. The title track is an Aldeanish power-chord-driven rocker with some fine assonance: ‘Camo hat on the dash, hammered down on the gas/ Chrome stacks blowing that black smoke’. The dad of the song’s co-writer Brad Clawson wrote Take a Little Ride for Aldean, which is basically a Chevy commercial.
Message In A Bottle is not a cover of the Police classic but a Breakups Make Me Miserable tune with a pedal steel wailing as our narrator, ‘a double shot desperado’, drinks his pain away. Bryan Martin pops up on Country Ain’t Going Nowhere, another one of those songs about being proud of your roots. There’s even some gang vocals yelling ‘NOWHERE!!’ in the chorus.
I’ll Be Damned is a Wallen pastiche with digital drum loops and a story that begins with the narrator hearing things ‘on the county line grapevine’. Camo Jacket was co-written with Dan Isbell who is often found in the credits of Luke Combs’s songs; it is what is known as ekphrasis, a description of an object that conjures up memories and emotions. The song is driven by a kickdrum and has a brilliant chorus, and it has no danger of being lost in the shuffle, as it might if Ernest had cut it.
Chase Bryant – Ashland City
Chase Bryant’s self-produced new project Ashland City is also 21 songs shorter than Ernest’s album. The confident quintet of songs are sung in a believable, tuneful manner. Wild Than Tame is an ‘I’m a little bit this, a little bit that’ song with chaingang percussion, a ferocious coda and a namecheck for La Grange by ZZ Top. Heart Ain’t A Hotel is a great way to tell people not to use them, even though it reminds me of how my mum used to say I treated her house like a hotel once I moved back home (she loves me really!).
Double Wide Dreamin’ is an imagery rich slice of small-time life, with the melancholic line ‘talk about leavin’ but you never get out’. Never Got Around To That also has a great chorus and a self-lacerating lyric; Blake Shelton could have cut this for his post-divorce album. Ditto Tequila on the Rocks, another ballad full of heart and hurt where our narrator is deciding whether he should get up and go.
It is also worth remembering that Chase was suicidally depressed at one point and tried to end his own life. As I wrote when listening to his album Upbringing, I am glad he didn’t.
Alex Miller – My Daddy’s Dad
Alex Miller’s beaming face often accosts me from the Billboard Country Update on one of his many, many promotional appearances at radio stations. Before listening to his new EP, which is another one that is 21 tracks shorter than Ernest’s album, I couldn’t hum any of his songs.
The EP’s sound is reassuringly retro, somewhere between 1990 and 1996. Ain’t Ever Saying Never is a love song crooned in the same ballpark that Scotty McCreery operates in, somewhere between Tracy Lawrence and George Strait. She Makes Dirt Look Good begins with four bars of fiddle before Alex comes in with some self-deprecating lyrics (‘never did stand out’). To continue the Blake Shelton references, it’s a rewrite of his song A Guy With A Girl in which, as with Blake, Alex is content to stand beside his beloved and bask in her reflected glow.
Jerry Salley co-wrote It Takes a Woman with Chris Stapleton, a highlight of his last album, and Salley was in the room for three songs on the EP, which he also produced. Oh Odessa is a finely sung Breakups Make Me Miserable song, while I won’t bother pointing out the Blake reference in The Last House in God’s Country, even though the song is a celebration of the house that built Alex.
The title track is also a Miller/Salley cut, telling the story of Alex’s grandpa, a Kentucky-raised cattle farmer who bought him his first guitar and was ‘the biggest fan I’ll ever have’. What a credit Alex is to his grandpa, and I hope he can come to the UK sometime soon.
A Country Way of Life 