Buddy & Julie Miller – In The Throes

Considering I write three record reviews a month for Country Music People I post very few ‘Records Of The Week’ on my site during the year. I simply don’t think many of the albums I write a review for the magazine are worth your time. They’re often not bad but I will never think to listen to them ever again.

One of the liberal things about my editor is that I can write what I want: I could never waste time on false platitudes or misleading the magazine readers. I’ve bought too many records, historically, that some erudite scribe has praised to the high heavens only to play it once as it’s so poor. Below is a review that I wrote; it’s highly uncomplimentary and is the most extreme illustration of my disdain but not necessarily an outlier of some of my negative write ups.

I did approach the editor before placing my quill on the parchment to suggest that this shouldn’t be reviewed. (Fwiw, I have some of their earlier and much better records.) He disagreed and knew what I might write. Enjoy!

The Millers have been pre-eminent in Americana for decades and it’d take a paragraph to list their awards and who’ve they’ve played with or produced. So approaching their fourth collaboration wasn’t maybe the worst writing project to turn up through my inbox? Wrong.

You can’t polish one or add glitter to it and the lasting impression is of an understated plodding low energy affair without a memorable tune. The songs with a Buddy lead vocal are the better ones (e.g. Tattooed Tear and I’ll Never Live It Down) but the majority of Julie’s vocals are something I wouldn’t care to listen to again. Her nadir is the execrable I Been Around where over a muffled guitar and plodding beat she releases her inner Yoko Ono (but maybe less in tune.)

Miller arranges the songs with occasional interesting instrumentation and it’s always well produced. Niccolo has a light acoustic arrangement that was worth half a star. Lyrically I Love You informs us that their love ‘is stronger than cement, too strong to ever get bent…’ It must have taken a couple of days to work this poetry up. And don’t get me started on the epic The Painkiller’s Ain’t Workin’. A more sparky electric affair that mines some deep mental states that may be personal but who wants to pay for this cathartic four minutes?

Their copious PR emits the sentence that this is ‘a deeply soulful collision of mournful gospel, dusty country, cosmic blues, ecstatic R&B and anything else that crosses their mind.’ Frankly, ‘collision’ tells you all you need to know. It gives me no pleasure to be so mean but life’s too short and money’s too tight to waste on this.