James McMurtry w/Joe Pug: at The Mercy Lounge (Nashville, TN) Thu. October 11, 2012

James McMurtry w/Joe Pug

Nashville Scene Critic's Pick …

The narrative drive of James McMurtry’s 2002 “Choctaw Bingo” is amazing — in eight minutes, the Texas singer concocts a portrait of rootless mid-American violence, complete with geopolitical overtones and the narrator’s fervent desire to make it with his halter-top wearing second cousins.What makes McMurtry special isn’t his music, although he definitely rocks out on tracks such as 2008’s “Freeway View,” from the fine Just Us Kids full-length.“Choctaw Bingo” folds in moonshine, meth and money, along with a McDonald’s that sits near the Will Rogers Turnpike and the narrator’s lust itself, which is like “an old bodock fencepost.”Just Us Kids contains McMurtry’s hardest, fastest and least stolid music — it’s Americana that acknowledges how the post-Reagan, post-Bush boom-and-bust has warped this country’s values.McMurtry is a newfangled Chuck Berry with politics and a novelist’s eye, and he’s a compelling, confident performer.

—Edd Hurt