http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/ar...oice.html?_r=1
“Bullets in the Gun”
(Show Dog/Universal)
You can almost hear the muscle atrophying on “Bullets in the Gun,” the latest from Toby Keith. More than a dozen albums into a career known best for rallying jingoists and for cheeky, not altogether unpleasant smugness, Mr. Keith is finally letting go of old modes. So much for bluster. So much for pride.
“Bullets in the Gun” is his most scattershot album to date, a jumble of attitudes and tactics. Much of the time Mr. Keith, who has been one of the most underappreciated vocal stylists in country music, is singing without conviction on songs that are mere archetypes and lack any of his signature gestures. “Trailerhood” is a lazy song full of backwoods clichés, and “Drive It On Home” toasts the wonders of trucking. On “Somewhere Else,” for perhaps the first time, he delivers syllables in quick, nimble fashion, in the style of Jason Mraz.
The title track, a pumped-up and comically desperate tale of a couple on the lam in Mexico, is slick and almost parodic (“We came to a town with a name I couldn’t spell”), as if from an imagined Marc Shaiman cowboy musical. Worse, apart from “Is That All You Got” — “This old heart didn’t die/It’s been broke by the best” — he’s all but forsaken the gentle big-lug soul he’s been toying with in recent years, which had been a thoughtful, winning strategy against aging. (The deluxe edition of this album includes four tracks recorded live at Irving Plaza in New York in June, including a tender version of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown.”)
In places on the album, though, he’s still preening, and these vestigial moments are welcome. On “Think About You All of the Time” he cockily assures an ex that breaking up with him didn’t release her from his clutches: “If by chance I start romancing/You guessed it/I think about you.” This unbruised, masculine presumptuousness continues on the album closer, “Get Out Of My Car,” a comically loathsome but likable statement of late-night purpose. “Get out of your clothes or get out of my car/Whichever you choose, I’m ready to go,” Mr. Keith sings, loosely referencing the melody of his 2005 single “As Good as I Once Was,” his genial celebration of the body in decline. Don’t keep him up all night: time’s a wastin’. JON CARAMANICA