Perfect Honky Pop
YES! This album isn't particularly original or innovative, but it does the honky pop genre just right. I would gladly drink beer and listen to this band play. Bob Collum is from Tulsa, Oklahoma and now lives in Basildon, Essex, and somehow his departure from the landscape in which this type of music was born has helped him find its heart. Thank you, Bob, for making a rootsy pop album that doesn't suck like North American country radio.
I think what I like best about Bob Collum & The Welfare Mothers is the fact that they remind me of Jon Snodgrass and Armchair Martian but with more steel guitar and honky slides. In high school, the only artists who could make me cry with lo-fi recordings were John Prine and Armchair Martian/Jon Snodgrass. Bob Collum's album won't make you cry, but it won't make you hate Americana, either. The cover of the album is a classic: a cowboy sits, resting his back against a tree while a rocket ship blasts off towards the moon through the aurora borealis. Meanwhile, Thomas Edison battles martians for hilarious American glory (kidding). I can't explain it. This album is just likeable, despite its various (minor) problems.
"Set The Stupid Free" suffers from some of the lyrical simplicities inherent to its pop allegiances, but problems like these can be overlooked for the most part. What's important about this album is that it is a self-sustaining member of the honky country genre that doesn't fall into the same flashy traps that murdered my respect for Travis Tritt, Toby Keith, Tim McGraw et al. A group of people wrote these songs together, not a machine that reads market symbols and plunders phony mythologies of the Wild West to satisfy blind buyers.
I love that Bob Collum tours with Ron Sexsmith. He should tour with Corb Lund, too, or Armchair Martian. In fact, if you see Bob Collum & The Welfare Mothers when they play at 12 Bar Club in London on January 23, or at London's Leytonstone Ex-Servicemen's Club on the 30th, ask him to listen to some Armchair Martian and then make an album that will make me sweetly maudlin.