This so wants to be a great record that one is tempted to lay its shortcomings against an unexceptional year (worse if you were a rock critic) for music, to blame it on tired ears. Hank Cochran, after all, wrote “I Fall To Pieces” and about a thousand other tunes and is in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Billy Don Burns is an Arkansas-bred singer-songwriter who’s been kicking around for decades, and if Cochran likes his voice well enough to offer him a disc full of songs, and then play along, that ought to be enough.
And, 1996 being what it was, it isn’t.
Cochran’s best songs are simple affairs that leave plenty of room for a singer (like Patsy Cline) to take the words soaring. Burns, unhappily, does not seem able to have a voice given to flight. His is a serviceable, manly, Waylon Jennings kind of sound, but it doesn’t have the resonance, the certainty, the tone nor the tension that separates great singers from the rest.
The songs are set against simple, loping rhythms, and, fitting to the subtitle (“The Legend and The Outlaw”), Desperate Men has a mid-’70s Austin sound to it, spare tunes without too many notes that ask for little enough finesse. That’s all fine and good — hell, it’s better than the treacle on the radio — but it doesn’t sound fresh and full of life. The songs tend to plod like a worn-out man walking from the bar to the bathroom, and there’s never a sense that if a fight broke out that metaphorical man would have the strength to do more than step aside. (And that from a lifelong pacifist…)
The mythos of the outlaw still has a powerful drag, and one suspects some of these songs might, in other hands, set that cigarillo smoking. (Smell a caricature there? That’s part of the problem with Desperate Men.) Other cuts, such as Cochran’s maudlin “Patsy”, are probably best left in the catalog.
