Charlie Robison – Good Times

The title implies a party album, but that’s barely half the story. If Robison is pushing to expand his slice of Pat Green and Robert Earl Keen’s audience — the sure to be a BBQ hit “Love Means Never Having To Say You’re Hungry” is pure pandering — he’s doing so with god-given charm and more subtlety than you’d guess from opening lines such as, “Pick up a pizza, pineapple ham/Put it in the back of the good times van.” It’s a fraternal pledge, but the song bites back at the baseball caps: “A lot of people talkin’, shut the hell up/Sneak out a beer in a styrofoam cup/I’m gonna start singin’ so don’t interrupt.”

Next to Terry Allen’s “Flatland Boogie”, applied with a lush Tex-Mex tempera, the album’s most colorful and catchy portrait, “New Year’s Day”, takes a cue from Keen’s “Corpus Christi Bay” and then deepens the humor of screwing up as a way of life. The ballads are the prettiest Robison has yet written: “Magnolia” sounds like a Country Gentlemen classic, and the hopelessly sentimental “Always” (as in “I will always love you”) is salvaged with sly, witty twists: “Believe me when I tell you that this old world is flat/’Cause I can always see you no matter where I’m at.”

Backed by an Austin A-Team (bassist Glen Fukunaga, guitarists David Grissom, and Rich Brotherton and pedal steel player Lloyd Maines, who also co-produces), Robison makes no attempt to veer from an easygoing Texas country-rock style. It’s the sound of close friends and family — brother Bruce adds harmony, and Maines’ daughter Natalie duets on a cover of Keith Gattis’ searching, class-conflicted “El Cerrito Place” — making exactly, unpretentiously the music they want to make.