Dwight Yoakam: dwightyoakamacoustic.net

For all its professed love of traditional values, commercial country radio has become as processed and modern as any pop station, with pretty blondes and big-hatted hunks driving out the genre's pioneers and war horses. Contemporary country hitmakers even share ballads with boy bands, so similar are the formulas. If there's an upside to the decline, it's that the rejected parties don't have to play the game anymore: In the late '80s, for example, k.d. lang, Dwight Yoakam, and Lyle Lovett could actually score airplay, but they generally had to make concessions to slick arrangements and studio musicians to get their music heard. Today, their music doesn't stand a chance at country play, which means lang has become an all-purpose chanteuse (and come out of the closet), Lovett has become a film actor who isn't afraid to release an esoteric two-disc collection of covers, and Yoakam can repackage and revisit his material on an acoustic disc with a clumsy and unabashedly modern title. Despite the implication of an Internet-only release, dwightyoakamacoustic.net arrives with full-scale distribution and backing from Yoakam's longtime label: If the bare-bones, booklet-free packaging indicates otherwise, the $18.98 list price is a ready reminder. But the 78 frequently astonishing minutes (25 songs!) are worth every penny, whether Yoakam is reworking his upbeat classics—"Little Ways" is virtually unchanged, while "Guitars, Cadillacs" is mournfully a cappella—or exercising his mastery of bleak, high-lonesome balladry ("This Drinkin' Will Kill Me," "Johnson's Love," "Buenas Noches From A Lonely Room"). You could argue that country radio's slide into a processed wasteland has actually been good for the genre, allowing its most talented practitioners to bypass studio hackwork and find the beauty and power in their material without commercial considerations. If the rise of Shania Twain and her ilk means more stripped-down beauties like dwightyoakamacoustic.net and Johnny Cash's similarly barren 1994 masterpiece American Recordings, the sacrifice is more than worth it.