Gary Allan

Gary Allan wants you to know that he's not pop-country. Guys, he loves, you know, Merle Haggard and stuff. Allan would like you to conclude, of course, that he is country and not pop. In fact, it seems to be the other way around: Allan is a whole lot of pop and not very much country.

Taking a Steve Earle kind of approach to pairing steel guitars and dang-ol-dang vocals to basic rock riffs, Allan offers a country-ish pop with more grit than that of, say, Kenny Chesney. But unlike Earle, who keeps things brisk and throws in leftist politics, Allan's got nothing but ballad after ballad.

And in that way, it's probably a mistake to compare him to country artists, since Allan has much more in common with 90's practitioners of alterna-schlock.

Like Collective Soul, The Goo Goo Dolls, and bands of that ilk, Allan makes much of the crunchy-guitars-plus-swelling-strings dichotomy. And that dichotomy can work really well, but when every song on an album uses the same trick, it starts to sound pretty old hat. And there's not a whole lot of substance to the songs.

Which is not to say this album is completely generic. The songs are well conceived and arranged, and Allan seems invested; I believe he's recording music he really likes. The problem is that the music Allan likes is, well, boring.