Sodden and schizophrenic, The Outsiders is Eric Church’s worst album. From 2006 to 2011, Church’s singing and writing improved bit by bit, peaking on Chief, an album for reactionaries and so-called liberals who lament the good days when Merle and Willie and Waylon made real country. I’ve played Chief more often than any album that placed in my top ten that year; it doesn’t stop asking what is “real” country, not to mention what comprises a real “country.” Encouraged by Chief‘s success — it debuted at #1 and “Springsteen” quietly climbed into the Hot 100 top twenty — Church now has ambitions, and good for him. Leading with a title track whose idea of transgression is copping Skid Row isn’t. Its ungainly riffing doesn’t come close to matching “Ain’t Killed Me Yet,” his loudest and punkest number. “That’s Damn Rock & Roll” begins with a basic drum pattern, bass solo, and Church in surly voice denouncing the things rock ain’t: heroin, luxury jets, “the money you make when a record gets sold.” We hear that voice a lot on The Outsiders: submerged in the silt of electronic burbles on “The Joint,” on which he channels “Rollin’ (The Ballad of Big & Rich)” and the Jagger of “Shake Your Hips”; searching for a hook, thesis, and conclusion in the prelude (!) to the stupid eight-minute “Devil Devil.”
But “Dark Side” hasn’t gotten much scrutiny in the laudatory reviews. Over faint strums and a mix as dust-choked as anything on Nebraska, Church sings about a man who suppresses his temper because he’s “dangerous to himself” (he switches keys to signal torment). To use lynching imagery for the sake of a personal apocalypse galled me, but not as much as the last stanza, in which he threatens to put a bullet into the thugs with their ugly mugs trying to sell drugs to his kid. I sense he wants to say “thugs with black mugs” but can’t for reasons of political expediency, commercial anxiety, changing times, and, who knows, genuine moral repugnance. Instead of finishing the thought, he lets out the faintest of chuckles before singing the chorus, now drenched in reverb.
This isn’t “Accidental Racist,” which was too moronic to offend. Projecting a rage beyond words is Church’s intention, I think, and even if he hadn’t written those lines “Dark Side” would still be rather barren melodically to call a standout; but its unresolved conflicts fascinate like most of The Outsiders doesn’t, where rage is a commodity as fungible as a concert T-shirt. Chief‘s “Homeboy,” in which Church laments how city life has changed an old friend, backed up its claims with musical details and Church’s determination to look like a racist asshole if it made for a honest performance. Indeed, “Give Me Back My Hometown” reads like a sequel to “Homeboy” — a fragile, thought-through expression of reactionary score settling, of losing influence on friends loved, of shit changing too fast to take it all in. Like the Miranda Lambert of “Famous in a Small Town,” the Paisley of “Southern Comfort Zone,” and, yeah, the Church of “Springteen” and “Carolina,” the Church of this tune can’t resist hand claps and massed choruses and arpeggios to prove he has a right to delineate the terms of his art, and when projecting the rage exhausts him he settles for wordless ooh-oohing. No contortions. In “Give Me Back My Hometown” Church presents a version of outsiderdom free of the title track’s cant and garlic breath; he’s a guy impatient with novelty, threatened with obsolescence. He’s close to being a crank and he knows it. He wonders whether his talents allow him to escape his fate; it’s what drives The Outsiders. Maybe he lacks those talents. A shame, not a tragedy, for country and hip-hop and pop in general offer a myriad cautionary tales of artists unable to synthesize expectations and weaknesses and curiosity into compelling songs. The tragedy would be if Eric Church were anything like his characters yet doomed to a life of unpersuasive growls.
Humanizing The Vacuum 