Great Divide – Break In The Storm
If you’re the kind of person who’s tempted to buy an album based on a quick read of the liner notes, be forewarned. Lloyd Maines (Joe Ely, Richard Buckner, Wayne Hancock) handles the production here, on a rerelease of this Oklahoma band’s second independent disc, and he’s all over the instrumentation on guitar, pedal steel and lap steel. Also featured is fiddler Gene Elders of George Strait’s Ace In The Hole Band.
All this talent is wasted, however, on saccharine songs and pedestrian lyrics that range from the Steve Earle-lite “Billy Covington”, and “But I Do” to the cutesy and too-clever frat-party anthem, “Pour Me A Vacation”, which not only sounds like a Jimmy Buffett song, it name-drops him in the chorus. There are a couple bright spots where the band leaves their Mellencamp-iness behind and delivers some decent pure country, such as “Heart Of Stone”, but they’re outweighed by the lackluster material throughout the rest of the album. There’s a great divide here indeed, but it is the deep gap between the talented names on the sleeve and the quality of the music within.