Live at Billy Bob's Texas in Bloomington, MN

One of several castaways from the moribund "hat act" scene of mid-'90s Nashville to find himself on this small
country
indie label,
Mark Wills
starts his post majors career with a no-frills live album that perhaps unintentionally shows exactly what went wrong with mainstream
music at the end of the millennium. There's more audible enthusiasm in
Wills
' vocals in the first minute of the wry opener
"And the Crowd Goes Wild"
than there was on the entire album of the same name that was
'
Mercury
swan song. Similarly, the arrangements are fundamentally the same as they were on
' earlier albums, with lots of rocking rhythm guitar lines underneath the twangy
leads, but unlike the pristine separation of the ultra-clean studio records, there are some rough edges. (The drummer's not playing to a click track, either, which helps a ton right there.)
is an affable Everyman of a singer with a little
Alan Jackson
in his vocal style, and his songs rarely rise above "catchy and hummable," so he was never going to be a
superstar on the
Garth Brooks
level, but this thoroughly enjoyable live record shows that he's a much more entertaining act than his previous albums had revealed. That's not his fault; it's the fault of the label folks who tend to stifle their artists into cookie-cutter conformity. ~ Stewart Mason