Part II of our look at the top ten country albums of 2006.
Danielle Peck
Danielle Peck
(Big Machine)
Perhaps the most difficult way to make a really superlative
commercial country album is to play by all the rules, and just do it better than everyone else. The lift here comes from smart songwriting and from
Peck's voice, a forceful instrument that gets
more powerful the more gently she applies it. If Peck fails to become a
big star, it will be for extramusical reasons:
She's far too sexy—not "pretty" like Faith Hill, but
sweet-merciful-Jesus-I'd-tap-that-without-a-warrant hot—for country's predominantly older female demographic.
Darryl Worley
Here and Now
(903 Music)
Worley was tagged as a
Toby Keith wannabe after
"Have You Forgotten?" (a bold riposte to the ... uh, approximately
zero Americans who didn't want
Osama bin Laden obliterated) rode the conflation of
Sept. 11 and the Iraq war to the top of the chart in
spring 2003, just as the Dixie Chicks were getting
Dixie Chicked. "Forgotten" aside, Worley is actually a thoughtful singer-songwriter with a flair for
naked emotion and
an eye for detail.
Newly free of both his major-label deal and his marriage, his latest is a
holler of liberated glee, the sound of
a man who can't wait to get into trouble. Sealing the deal is
"I Just Got Back from a War," about an American soldier's anger and confusion at not being greeted as a liberator. It's bleak and daring, and Keith wouldn't touch it with a
10-foot flag.
Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift
(Big Machine)
Nashville tried, and failed, to get in on the
teen-pop extravaganza of a few years ago. Now that Britney is a divorcee with two kids, it finally succeeds with this
16-year-old wunderkind. Swift neither plays for cuteness, nor poses as
jailbait; she simply uses her native intelligence to express clearly to anyone who will listen her hopes for the future, her
growing worldliness and her dawning awareness that
boys may be more trouble than they're worth.
Kellie Pickler
Small Town Girl
(BNA Nashville)
The
big-voiced, calamari-hating Pickler finished sixth on the latest season of
American Idol, which in Nashville narrowcasting terms is a dream marketing setup. Add the right collaborators (like
songwriter Aimee Mayo and producer Blake Chancey), and you wind up with an
unvarnished pop-country jewel featuring a
surprisingly confident headliner who's
not as dumb as you think.
Jace Everett
Jace Everett
(Sony Music Nashville)
Justin Timberlake brought sexy back to pop in 2006 (or at least announced that intention), but country apparently wasn't ready for the same. Everett's slyly insinuating singles
"That's the Kind of Love I'm In" and
"Bad Things" (as in, things he wants to do to you, sweet thing) barely dented the charts, and
his album was quietly dumped into stores. Everett
lost his deal in a merger and by July was
ranting about "the dumbing down and homogenization of our culture" on his MySpace page. You know what that means:
A great screw-the-music-business album is brewing somewhere.
Good luck finding a rhyme for "homogenization," but I'm sure someone in Music City can swing it. -
CHRIS NEAL
For Part I of this article, see yesterday's blog.
What do you think? Are these the top ten country music albums of 2006 or did we miss something? Tell us what you think - just leave a note in the comment section below. Thanks!
