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BLACK STONE CHERRY

Black Stone Cherry

Roadrunner
rating icon 4 / 10

Track listing:

01. Rain Wizard
02. Backwoods Gold
03. Lonely Train
04. Maybe Someday
05. When the Weight Comes Down
06. Crosstown Woman
07. Shooting Star
08. Hell and High Water
09. Shapes of Things
10. Violator Girl
11. Tired of the Rain
12. Drive
13. Rollin' On

Got a burning desire to hear a big, loud, slightly twangy marriage of NICKELBACK and BRAND NEW SIN? Yeah, me either. The single, "Lonely Train", has already been tapped as a WWE theme song, which oughta slot these guys right in where they belong – the token new rock band of the year for disaffected white yahoos from the heartland whose CD collections run more toward TOBY KEITH and well-worn greatest hits collections from STEVE MILLER and VAN HALEN.

The promised infusion of SKYNYRD into this pedestrian hard rock isn't quite up to the advertised levels. Imagine, instead, an earful of that calculated, 1980s-era MOLLY HATCHET, the stuff that torpedoed the band's career. You know what's going on here — girls will rock your world, big trains roll, gypsy women tell your fortune, the rain comes down, blah blah blah. The whole thing sounds great, big and slick and arena-ready. But it's all echo and phony yowl, generic and tiresome, mired in some middle-aged radio programmer's idea of what constitutes rocking out in 2006.

And yeah, lots of NICKELBACK, even in the tendency of some of the "album cuts" to be a little heavier, and throw in some gratuitous double-kick drumming, as if there was a much tougher and more vital band wrapped up inside this much more salable package (see "Backwoods Gold"). There's nothing wrong with being a populist band, and shooting for the stars, but it'd help if the band brought some memorable songwriting to the table, instead of this fluff.

Ersatz riff rock for truck commercials.

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