- Record Label: Lost Highway
- Release Date: Jun 2, 2009
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Roadhouse Sun sounds like he's still making his "Greetings from Asbury Park"--the kind of record whose clunkers are obvious enough to put a chink into the album's very real virtues.
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Bingham isn't an innovator, he's a reanimator, and on Roadhouse Sun the 28-year-old breathes new life into alt-country clichés through the power of his weathered croon and his stiff-jangle arrangements.
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Occasionally, there's the odd phrase that feels a little contrived, and Bingham's sandpaper-soaked-in-whiskey voice sometimes broadcasts a hard-scrabble life as unsubtly as a blinking neon sign outside a peep show. But at 28, he has the stamina to hang on well into his old age, when his voice will sound as fittingly elemental as a lightning storm in the Texas Panhandle.
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He connects the listener with emotions and ideas common to us all and, in doing so, reinforces the power and reinvigorates the promise of a genre once defined by the Cashs, Haggards and Jennings of the world.
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Even skeptics should find Bingham's second album, embellished with a bit more pop and politics, a convincing step beyond his promisingly earthy 2007 debut.
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Lofty comparisons, sure. But Bingham's not a "new" anything: He's his own man, and a singular talent at that.
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FilterWhichever feeling he aims for--rousing or reflective--this Texan achieves striking authenticity. [Spring 2009, p.102]
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