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Date Posted: 13:13:13 10/16/01 Tue
Author: No name
Subject: Tomorrow's Sounds Today, Dwight Yoakam

Tomorrow's Sounds Today, Dwight Yoakam
( Reprise)




Hillbilly Deluxe

By Amy Linden

It might have a catchy kitsch, swinging modern feel to it, but in calling his latest album Tomorrow's Sounds Today, Dwight Yoakam is just flat-out wrong. If anything, Yoakam's latest takes listeners back to the past rather than forward to the future, no matter what the space-age bachelor-pad title might imply. Better title? Yesterday's Sounds Right Now, because on this dandy collection the always-solid Yoakam's approach is closer to the Bakersfield blues and early western-swing grooves he first cooked up when he came on the scene back in 1986. Set your ears for fiddles, quasi-rockabilly and a laid-back, ungimmicky feel that reminds you why Yoakam is the most satisfying and consistent artist in country and why the neo-traditional movement he helped usher in (Rodney Crowell, white courtesy phone) still ranks as the high point of the contemporary country-music era. This album reminds you why Dwight Yoakam is the most satisfying and consistent artist in country.





Yes, our boy Dwight has got his pointy-toed boots firmly in cowpoke territory as he turns even a cover of Cheap Trick's "I Want You To Want Me" (RealAudio excerpt) into a rodeo-worthy roundup with everything but the "yee-hah"s. As he did with his rendition of Queen's Gap-ad-appropriate "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," Yoakam plays it tongue-in-cheek but also shows that "I Want You To Want Me" is, at its heart, a killer pop song, one that can withstand any form of musical interpretation. And, of course, Yoakam shows he can still let it rock.


Twangy guitars, melancholy pedal steel and mournful, high country fiddles abound on this collection, the former providing a characteristically Yoakam-ish bite and snap to the opening track, "Love Caught Up to Me" (RealAudio excerpt) — "Baby I couldn't hide, no matter how hard I tried .../ By the time I got free, love caught up with me." As for the fiddles, listen to the beautiful Celtic-meets-Appalachia strains of "For Love's Sake" (RealAudio excerpt), with its waltz-time rhythms and its time-honored tale of a good man caught up in the web of a hopefully evolving love. Romance, as usual, is the main theme, not only the good true love of "For Love's Sake," but also love gone wrong (the piquant raver "What Do You Know About Love," which declares "What do you know 'bout how it feels/ What do you know 'bout if it's real...") and love that often ends in heartache (e.g. the last-call-for-alcohol two-step blues of "A Promise You Can't Keep").


Produced as always by Yoakam's guitarist Pete Anderson, the man behind those ripping rodeo chords and the surfing-in-the-Mississippi flair that has made Yoakam's sound palatable to retro-rockers and Nashville cats alike, Tomorrow's Sounds Today forgoes the livelier and more genre-bending studio tricks that pushed mid-'90s albums such as Gone and This Time into brave new sonic realms. This time around, as it was in the beginning, the mood is modest, the sound is sparse and sans embellishments. Dwight and band create country music that does the art form proud by refusing to play by Nashville's current set of stifling rules.

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