Rediscovered Country

Eric Church Carolina (Capitol)

Over the course of the last hundred or so years, country music has gone from being music for broken-back dreamers suffering hard luck and hard times to music for disgruntled radio listeners seeking a substitute for hard rock. It's no coincidence that, as pop trends skewed younger, country's choruses got bigger, gradually reaching a point at which there was no real difference between Keith Richards and Keith Urban. Is it any wonder ex-rockers like Bon Jovi and Kid Rock have been aggressively courting the country set?

Though he never reaped the commercial success of many of his peers, North Carolina songwriter Eric Church is a good example of this new nexus. His 2006 debut, Sinners Like Me, was a little wonder, a slick and savvy combination of rock bravado and country croon, yielding a wealth of memorable refrains. If his follow-up, Carolina (Capitol), seems more modest, it's perhaps because its tricks are not as surprising. Church still proves skilled at gilding cornpone wisdom with rock grit. In the opening track, he itemizes a list of his self-destructive tendencies over a grizzled guitar riff and gives names to his lonely dismay in the pealing "Without You Here." And if the record could use more moments like the truly dazzling outro to "Those I've Loved," it's a minor grievance. The worst you can say about him is that he's consistent.

Bonnie "Prince" Billy Beware (Drag City)

Will Oldham also has a thing for consistency. Since adopting the Bonnie "Prince" Billy moniker eight years ago, he has gradually sanded the edges off his heartbroke Appalachia, writing songs that amble rather than stride. His latest, Beware (Drag City), is his most manicured to date, baleful Memphis horns and loping slide guitar running up the center of his campfire ballads. Used to be that Oldham couldn't carry a tune, but he croons just fine here, holding together the center of fragile ballads like "You Are Lost." Oldham makes music for that other group of disillusioned rockers, the kind who gradually traded Pavement for Wilco and Neko Case. "It is my life's work," he pleads early in the record, "to bring you into the light, from out of the dark." Salvation has rarely sounded so desperate or so tentative.

( j_keyes@citypaper.net)