Steve Earle And The Dukes - Exit 0 (Exit 0 - Steve Earle & the Dukes)

Member Name: DavidJay

Product:	Exit 0 - Steve Earle & the Dukes
Date:	29/08/08 (26 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A fantastic set of instant classics.

Disadvantages: Well, except for two unfortunate slips.

Steve Earle's second "proper" album, Exit 0, arriving one year after Guitar Town, his wildly successful 1986 debut, elaborates - to mostly stunning effect - upon that album's merging of contemporary Country music and blue-collar, Springsteen-esque Rock N Roll.

Earle knew that Guitar Town was probably has last chance at making it as a performer in his own right, having been writing and demoing songs for other artists in and around Nashville for over a decade hitherto. That album sounded driven, determined, yet shot through with a palpable sense of frustration and desperation. Exit 0 sounds no less driven or determined, but the anxieties regarding the uncertain future that haunted its predecessor are herein swapped in favour of nostalgia for such.

Exit 0 is full of songs of yearning - yearning for a time when there was something to yearn for. The small-town guys and gals who populate these songs are all striving for something - for escape, for love, for whatever..., and one suspects that Earle, flush with success, almost envies them, especially so when those protagonists are thinly-veiled versions of himself, as in the outstanding Angry Young Man.

Angry Young Man also points towards the kind of fearless self-analysis Earle would later take to a lacerating conclusion in the dark, pre-rehab The Hard Way. It's a short walk from Angry Young Man's "Mamma if you could see me right now / You'd be so sure you failed me somehow" to, for example, The Other Kind's "I'm still the apple of my Mamma's eye / And all my Daddy's worse fears realized..."

The difference is in the delivery. Where The Hard Way often made for an uncomfortable, disturbing listen, Exit 0 jives and licks and rolls with infectious glee from one end to the other.

Classic tracks abound - 80% of the songs herein are amongst Earle's very best, from the aforementioned Angry Young Man to the rollicking opener Nowhere Road to the gorgeous closing ballad, It's All Up To You, a track seemingly directed at the characters of the nine preceding tracks.

"Nobody said it would be easy" runs the second verse, "But it don't have to be this hard."

It's a message Earle would soon need as much as anyone.

Exit 0 and Guitar Town are both indispensable records, and records that sound like none others in Earle's discography. By 1988's Copperhead Road he would have turned his back on country radio entirely, for the benefit of both himself and his listeners. But even if he himself outgrew it, that's no reason for the rest of us to relish these classic records any the less.

And we'll say nothing about the fairly wretched San Antonio Girl or I Love You Too Much - songs for which the skip function was surely invented.

Summary: The last of Earle's "pure" country-rock records, and pretty near perfect at that.