BR5-49: Big Backyard Beat Show

BR5-49 sounds like Nashville's best bar band, and indeed, the group got its start playing endless shows at Robert's Western World—since self-billed as "Home Of BR5-49"—in Music City. The group's choice of source material is impeccable; each record deftly mixes originals with oldies, challenging you to tell the two apart. But somehow, the group's second full-length album never quite catches fire the way BR5-49's live sets do. The covers on Big Backyard Beat Show are, of course, dead on: There's a run through Buck Owens' "There Goes My Love," Billy Joe Shaver's "Georgia On A Fast Train," and Johnny O'Keefe's "Wild One"—which, predictably, is closer to Jerry Lee Lewis' rendition than to Iggy Pop's. And the nine originals, split between guitarists Gary Bennett and Chuck Mead, are nearly inseparable from the classics the band picks from the country family tree. All those years playing the Nashville circuit have paid off, and now the band is paying the ironic price: The members of BR5-49 play like the seasoned pros they are, and Big Backyard Beat Show sometimes sounds like the work of accomplished studio musicians rather than rough-and-tumble outsiders. "Goodbye, Maria," for instance, is a miserable stab at Tex-Mex that reveals the group's stylistic shortcomings. Yet with songs as good as "Pain, Pain Go Away," "You Are Never Nice To Me," and "Change The Way I Look," it seems pointless to quibble. Slick or not, BR5-49 is grin-inducing, good-old-boy fun.