Customer Rating: 
Summary: McMurtry's Best
Comment: I've been listening to James McMurtry since he started recording. This is his best album yet. I've listened to it almost constantly since I bought it a week ago. He writes lyrics suited to his flat vocal style, and music that takes advantage of his guitar style. I was only disappointed by one song on the album (Freeway View just does nothing for me). His ballads are written like short stories, and "Ruby and Carlos" and "Fire Line Road" are his best yet. If they don't bring tears to your eyes the first time you really listen to the lyrics you don't have a heart. His upbeat/rocking songs are angrier than he's been in the past. I'm pretty sure (to misquote Nanci Griffith another of my favorites) that James and I cancel each other out when we go to the polls here in Texas, but "Cheney's Toy" and "Ruins of the Realm" are catchy tunes, and the lyrics are clever. The best song on the album is the title track, the group of friends that never quite grow up until they find "their long hair turning grey, not so skinny, maybe not so free, not quite as many as we used to be". That tune was enough to make me pick up the phone and catch up with some college buddies I haven't talked to in fifteen years.
If you fall on the left side of the political spectrum run out and get this now. If, like me, you tend to lean to the right but you can put politics aside to listen to some of the best contemporary folk music out there today, run out and get this now.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Album
Comment: I just love the new CD. A lot of the songs remind me a little bit of past albums. I like it more each time I listen to it, just like all the rest of James Mcmurty's music. I have all of his CD's and they never get old.
The Governor is so cool. I love the first two seconds the most. classic James McMurty guitar with that powerful greasy grind.
(Ray Wiley Hubbard described it better re: Rays version of Chaktaw Bingo)
True Americana. Keep up the great works James.
Customer Rating:
Summary: EDGY COUNTRY BLUES WITH OUTSTANDING LYRICS
Comment: I'm not familiar with JM's music and this is the only album of his that I have. I recently bought 'Snake Farm' by Ray Wylie Hubbard, and I came accross JM as I was browsing the Amazon site (although this particular album wasn't featured at that time) - and I'm very glad that I did. There's not a great deal that I can add to what other favourable reviewers have already said, so I will keep my review fairly short (for a change).
Although not a 'powerful' singer, JM's vocals are fluent and his dry laconic delivery is well suited to this type of music (edgy country blues ?) - in fact, there are some subtleties in his phrasing and timing that I enjoyed very much. His lyrics are some of the most potent that I've ever heard - JM 'pulls no punches'. Some of his songs deal with the all too familiar theme of the fallout from political adventurism and corruption. Others are social commentaries about ordinary people living on the edge in smalltown America - people with only dreams or memories to help ease the feeling of desolation in their lives.
Most of the songs are slow to medium tempo, but 'Bayou Tortous' and 'Freeway View' are straight ahead rockers; there is one instrumental also - 'Brief Intermission'. The playing is first class - you can't fault the musicianship; there are some notable short solos : piercing electric lead guitar on 'Bayou Tortous' (James McMurtry), and searing Lap Steel on 'Fire Line Road' (Jon Dee Graham); also, some full-on boogie-woogie piano on 'Freeway View' courtesy of Ian McLagan (of the Small Faces).
With so many good songs (all penned by JM), it's difficult to choose any favourites - but if I had to, it would be these : 'Just Us Kids', 'Cheney's Toy', 'Hurricane Party', 'Ruby and Carlos', 'Fire Line Road' and 'Ruins of the Realm'.
I thought this was an album with some great edgy music and exceptionally fine lyrics; but if you are looking for 'sweetness and light', then don't come here. If JM's earlier albums are as good as this, I think I'll be buying these too; 4.5 stars.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: We thought that he'd know better
Comment: You know the bitter guy who just wants to gripe about everything and take shots at everybody else? Well imagine he made an album and you have a pretty good idea about "Just Us Kids". It starts off promising enough with a nice swampy rocker (Bayou Tortous) and the title track is an engaging track about grown-up kids with unrealistic dreams about how everything is going to be better in the future. This is undoubtedly the high point of the album. Things start to fall apart with "God Bless America" but at least musically still interesting. From there the songs are not only musically uninspired but lyrics full of bitterness and whining. The political commentary is trite and unimaginative, attacking the usual boogeymen--Bush, big oil, multinationals. Even worse he seems to have disdain for the down on their luck characters in his other songs, with no trace of sympathy or irony that I can detect. Not recommended unless you are into leftist paranoid vitriol.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Even better than LEVELAND
Comment: McMurtry has his finger and a well tuned ear to the sound of a nation choking on its own vomit. The characters who populate these songs are devastated and kicked to the curb by the Empire that Would Rule the World. Problem is, it's rotting, like ancient Rome, from the inside, and McMurtry has been chronicling its demise for sometime now. Presently self-awareness in the US has caught up with the Oracle that would be James. And he's been at it for a while. His comments on his live CD directed at Barbara Bush ("Nixon said that George Bush was milquetaost, but Barbara Bush - there's a woman that can hate.") at first seemed ill mannered. Who knew he was staring directly at Medusa and not turning to stone? In this latest disc there are stories of older women with younger lovers both damaged from the war and its aftermath, there are speed addicts and kids with nothing to do and less to aim for, drifers and those hanging to the ledge of the economy by their fingernails, all about to be left for dead by the powerful and the wealthy. There is never much of a view of the privileged. They are conspicuous by their absence, though. And it is all very, very heartbreaking.
McMurtry has assembled a superb band and the sound of this recording is immediate, urgent, live. In nearly every respect it is the equal and in some cases better than WHERE'D YOU HIDE THE BODY? with its classic track, "Levelland". His landscape is barren, more desperate, dire than any other writer save maybe Cormac McCarthy, and I don't know if Cormac can play guitar. If you are a fan of McMurtry, get this - it is absoluetly 5 stars. Brilliant in the extreme, and the characters herein are in extremis. Not for the weak or feint of heart.
The implication is clear: there's an eelection on - are you gonna stay the course? It leads to the gutter and the ruin of a nation.
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