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The protest songs on Just Us Kids, particularly 'Cheney's Toy,' will hog all the attention, but they're the least of this roots rocker's treasures here. It's James McMurtry's brilliant character sketches that really shine.
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Live, McMurtry can still be way too strophic and trad. But he's never made an album so loud or hard.
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In such stories, McMurtry locates again and again an element of humanity that saves his angriest screeds from easy pigeonholing.
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Just Us Kids is an album very much of its time that also speaks to the larger ideas of life in America in an uncertain age, and it's brave, smart, and pithy music that captures James McMurtry at the top of his game.
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It’s the ache of 'Ruby and Carlos' that reveals McMurtry’s sensitive brilliance as a chronicler of quiet desperation (though even here, he can’t resist a jibe about “the Mason-Dumbass Line”).
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McMurtry cuts through all the crap when describing the state of America these days. Call McMurtry’s music what you will, just don’t call it kids’ stuff.
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MojoA definate contender when those Best of the Year polls gets underway. [Aug 2008, p.105]
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Q MagazineHe's getting better with age. [Aug 2008, p.140]
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Muscularly arranged with bongolated beats, psychedelic swamp guitars, boogie-woogie pine top and snowballing chorus hooks, Just Us Kids approximates a certain literate strain of early-'80s album rock.
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He's always here to try to twist reality's wires some more, just so, and leave a little room to move.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 9 out of 11
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Mixed: 1 out of 11
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Negative: 1 out of 11
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PaulCMay 13, 2008The songs themselves are excellent, in particular "Cheney's Toy," but I can't help but wish someone else was performing them.
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EricO.May 12, 2008
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LarryWMay 10, 2008