Grant Langston
Album: Hope You're Happy Now
Label: California Roots Union
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.grantlangston.com

Inspired by Willie Nelson's Phases and Stages, the Alabama-born, Bakersfield-based Americana singer-songwriter set out to make an old-school record "about quiet stories and steel guitars", a departure from the Telecaster driven honky tonk sound of his last two releases. The result's a no less engaging album, but one more caught up in a reflective melancholy to match the darker material about broken dreams, busted marriages and booze.

Indeed, it's the latter that sets the scene for opening number Drive as he sings "I bought us a couple of whiskeys, you look like you could use a drink" while pedal steeps weeps all over the bar and Langston goes on to namecheck Lucinda Williams in support of the narrative. There's a couple of uptempo numbers, the riffing boogie Born To Ride (a touch of the Stones, perhaps) and The Nonsense which offers a wry look at the social and financial fallouts of divorce, while staying with failed marriages, Breaking Hearts takes the pace back down as it unfolds a dark humoured tale of an ex-husband sinking into the bottle.

I'm fonder of the slower material, the heartaching The Only One, the gentle acoustic cowboy roll of lyrically dark The Trigger ("maybe I'm pure evil, maybe I'm the devil's son, but you were all right there with me, we pulled the trigger on that gun") and the decidedly Nelson-like All That I Can Do notable highlights.

He's slightly more playful in the closing stretch, tongue firmly in cheek with the very twangsome, piano backed Bakersfield sounding father-son story I Work Too Hard, the amusingly punny Me And The Misses, where mutual incompatibility proves the unlikely glue in a marriage, and, returning to the opener's honky tonk, Me And Margaret spins another story of two characters bonding over some real drinking.

It's not going to earn him the sort of accolades and following that Willie's accrued, but anyone who's into the sound of Bakersfield country will undoubtedly be answering big yes to the album title.

Mike Davies