Shooter Jennings – Electric Rodeo
On his debut, Waylon’s boy Shooter announced his intention to Put The O Back In Country. It was a spotty affair, filled with precisely the proportion of wise-ass attitude to gut-punch emotion you’d have predicted from the album title. Still, the single “4th Of July”, which jangled big-hearted down the road blasting the Possum and falling in love, hinted there might be more to this kid than just the pedigree announced by the big winged “W” family crest he’d adopted.
On his follow up, Electric Rodeo, Jennings seems determined to put the crock back in cock rock. The opening title track cranks a generic metal riff that’s derivative as all hell and, at this late date –after Jason, after Hank III — not even very surprising, but it does have a sonic oomph that still sounds, you know, kewl at high volume…as long as you don’t pay too much attention to the lyrics, which are teenage romantic and at once self-pitying and self-celebrating: “It’s been sixteen weeks since I been back home/I make a lot of money, I don’t know where it goes/All I know is the guitar and the bottle/My daddy was a loaded gun…” The track goes on like that until near the end when he imitates his daddy, warning: “This time will be the last time.”
Well, I don’t know if it’s as bad as all that. But Electric Rodeo is alternately tame and silly, filled on the one hand with drinking and drug songs you’ve heard before, and on the other with huge choruses and climaxes that are very loud when they might have been better suited very quiet. There are lots of Skynyrd allusions (“Gone To Carolina” suggests he’d been listening to “Tuesday’s Gone” and Aerosmith) and Hank Jr. references (He’s on the prowl for “Some Rowdy Women”), but not much of anything here suggests Shooter knows who Shooter is. Not yet.