The Musical Divide

A new Flatland Cavalry album always feels welcome. I’ve long championed this band for making very warm and breezy Texas country music, with an earnest, youthful accessibility that’s always felt inviting – thanks to both lead singer Cleto Cordero’s charming songwriting and a general warmth in tone that this band has made more fully their own over the course of their career. There’s been a general uniform consistency to their albums that’s usually always made them year-end favorites of mine, usually with a deep-cut or two joining the ranks as some of my favorite individual moments of the year.

With that said, I’ve struggled to find the same connection with newest album Wandering Star. It’s not necessarily that the generally consistent formula has grown stale by now. If anything, the few more experimental moments here are the ones that really didn’t work. Cordero simply lacks the heft and swagger needed to pull off the barn-burning honky tonk of opening song “The Provider,” and while the jaunty, old-school blues of “Let It Roll” is pulled off well musically, it’s also a bit too cutesy and corny lyrically for its own good.

There are a few unexpected pivots that work surprisingly well – I really dug the rollicking, groove-heavy snarl of “Oughta See You (The Way I Do)” - but for the most part I’d say this band once again operates best within its comfort zone. Although even that seems to be missing the same magic and warmth as before. It doesn’t help that this album runs long and is fairly sleepy and ballad-heavy – with a lot of plodding compositions, at that - nor does it help that Dwight A. Baker’s production style feels a bit flat across the board in generating greater life for these tones. There’s a still a great, warm neotraditional current running beneath a lot of the fiddle and acoustic tones as well as the traces of piano and organ, don’t get me wrong. And that helps carry moments like the great waltz cadence of “Only Thing At All,” as well as the general heartbreaking intimacy of “Don’t Have To Do This Like That.”

But it also leaves certain tracks feeling oddly muted and hollow, or at least not quite as punchy or memorable as they could be. I talked about this somewhat when I reviewed “Last American Summer” earlier this year, and for as much as I hate to say it, the duet featuring Cordero’s wife and hell of a singer-songwriter in her own right, Kaitlin Butts, via “Mornings With You” is a sleepy dud that doesn’t have the same flair as their other well-known duet.

Sadly, too, I’d also say the writing has taken a slight step back overall. It’s another element I already mentioned when I reviewed the fairly plain and conventional faded summer romance of “Last American Summer,” but between the stock working man blues of “The Provider,” the “get to living” platitudes of “The Best Days,” and especially the cringey social reflections of “New American Dream” that never generally age well, this album is missing the same simple insight this band could also provide at its best before.

We still get a lot of warm, existential musings on the album highlight of “A Thousand Miles an Hour,” and the album in general ends on good notes between the bright and jaunty “Oughta See You (The Way I Do)” as well as the optimistic outlook in spite of a breakup on “Burned Out Flame.” And I will stress that this is a still a mostly enjoyable album in spite of its flaws, if only because Cordero is still an inviting and charismatic performer overall. It’s just missing the same magic that made this band’s earlier albums easier to revisit; that’s all.

(6/10)

• Favorite tracks: “A Thousand Miles an Hour,” “Oughta See You (The Way I Do),” “Don’t Have to Do This Like That,” “Only Thing At All”
• Least favorite track: “New American Dream”

Buy or stream the album.