Ryan Bingham
Album: Fear and Saturday Night
Label: Hump Head
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.binghammusic.com

Having won an Oscar, Grammy and Golden Globe for The Weary Kind, the song featured on the soundtrack of the 2009 Jeff Bridges movie Crazy Heart, Bingham then surprised everyone by not following the expected route to establish himself in mainstream country, but rather quitting his major label deal with Lost Highway, setting up a small independent label with his wife , and releasing the far from accessible Tomorrowland, an album fuelled by rage against and defiance of the system, packed with heavy riffing guitars and generally coming on like an Americana Led Zeppelin.

Although rasping, distorted guitars still find a home on the bluesy Top Shelf Drug and the choppy Bo Diddleyish rhythms of Hands Of Time and, with its saloon bar piano fills, Radio takes on a swampy funky boogie groove, this time round he's nowhere near as noisy or aggressive, the experience of losing both his parents (she to alcoholism, he a suicide), getting married and having a daughter resulting in a more reflective, melancholic affair (written and recorded in the solitude of an Airstream trailer in the California mountains) that frequently pulls back the skin to expose a bruised but still beating heart.

With a voice that sounds like he's gargling dust and gravel with a whisky and nicotine mouthwash, he opens proceedings with Nobody Knows My Trouble, a jaunty Guy Clark styled jog through autobiographical lyrics about escaping pills and the bottle through a guitar and music while redemption continues to flow through the waltzing, harmonica blowing Broken Heart Tattoos, a skewed love song to his as then unborn child. He mines the same autobiographical stream on the slow, bluesily ambling title track as he refuses to deny his nature, declaring himself 'born to run wild' while, perhaps referring to what the industry sought to seduce him with following the Oscar, the sparse, Dylanesque, acoustic scuffling My Diamond Is Too Rough asserts the self-integrity he "never traded for their love".

If the songs never really get any more substantial than this or musings on love and relationships, they nevertheless frequently show the sort of lyrical and musical muscle that makes for repeat plays. The Tex-Mex mariachi-flavoured story song Adventures of You And Me For offers simple bouncy joie de vivre, the gradually building, mandolin streaked Dylanish Island In The Sky is an affirmation of surviving the odds and the tender, uncluttered slow dance Darlin' and the shuffling Snow Falls In June, with its fingerpicked acoustic and bluesy electric solo, both profess love and constancy.

Built around wearied distorted harmonica and a steady spare drum beat, the slow and decidedly Dylan influenced Gun Fightin' Man is a bit of a let down as an album closer, with its overly familiar imagery of life demanding tough attitudes and choices and the line about death riding a pale horse, but otherwise this offers further testimony that, while the self-paved road may sometimes be a hard and lonely place to walk, it often leads to you far more interesting destinations than those easy rides.

Mike Davies