Pat Green is a Texas fixture. True story; when I moved here, he was all over billboards for a local car dealership advertising Two Texas Originals. And that, o Daily Vault faithful, is all I knew about him. So when I got a chance to review his latest disc, I figured it would be worth a shot.
For the most part, it was a good decision. I haven’t heard any of Green’s past work, so judging on its own merits Cannonball is a nice country-rock CD but not anything groundbreaking. It doesn’t take your breath away, but it’s pretty good driving music. The impression I get, though, is that Green is something special, something more than just a good singer — and at least one Web site I found (see, I do research) says that he was better, much better, when he was still recording his own CDs on an independent label.
What I’ve tried to do is listen to Cannonball on its own merits, and there are a good number of them. Green has a great voice — it’s got a little rasp and smoke to it, but it’s also clear and very musical. The musicianship is dynamite; I wish I could tell you who performed on this CD, but the liner notes are practically non-existent and what there are are all dedications and thank-yous. (I don’t mind dedications and thank-yous, but I’d like to know who the drummer was, too.) The production is non-descript and lets the music speak for itself, and that’s enough.
The flaw on Cannonball is the songwriting. The musical style is straight-ahead country-rock with a distressing tendency to wrap itself in a cloak of blandness. There are a couple of notable songs on Cannonball — I really enjoyed “Way Back Texas,” “Missing Me,” “Lost Without You” and the deeply reflective and powerful “I’m Trying To Find It,” but the rest sort of blend into a haze of similarity. One of the local radio stations is playing the first single, “Feels Just Like It Should,” and while it’s a decent song it could be in the musical dictionary next to ‘Generic Country-Pop Driving Song.’
Cannonball does nothing new. But what it does do, it does well. It’s not a groundbreaker, but it’s not bad, either.
