Country's 'Bad Guy' Is Just Not So Good

"That Don't Make Me a Bad Guy" captures everything great about Toby Keith: Oil barrel chest swelling with baritone melodies. Crisp hooks you feel like you've known since birth. Cocksure lyrics that skip between playful and pushy. After just a few bars, you can almost hear Keith's mischievous grin curling beneath that sawdust goatee.

But that only describes "Bad Guy" the song. It's the title track of Keith's 14th studio album, a ballad-heavy disappointment that finds the self-proclaimed "Big Dog Daddy" doing the unthinkable: downsizing.

And this, my friends, is how we know America is in real trouble. Just six years ago, Keith, already a huge country star, elbowed his way into the larger national consciousness with "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)," a brash, chart-topping response to Sept. 11 in which the Oklahoma native promised to lodge his boot in the posteriors of our enemies. Today we find the American economy atrophied, our morale subprime. We need someone who's ready to take a boot to Wall Street's hindquarters -- or at least a loudmouth who can tide us over with a few good punch lines.

Keith doesn't come through on either front, opting instead for feckless balladry. The songwriting is lukewarm, his voice is smaller and his verses aren't nearly as snappy, funny or heartfelt as fans have come to expect. Very odd, considering Keith's 2007 album, "Big Dog Daddy," proved him completely capable of conjuring a kinder, gentler Toby without sacrificing the hubris and humor that made him Nashville's leading alpha male.

The dawdling "I Got It for You Girl" finds Keith shedding his macho trappings with a heartsick plea, "I need you to need me, complete my world." A needy Toby Keith? That's a conceit even the singer himself might find hard to swallow, and he croons it halfheartedly.

He takes another wrong turn with "God Love Her," this time into his upper register, crooning high-pitched hosannas for the preacher's daughter while U2-inspired guitar fluff chimes in the background.

Not all of these songs are made of marshmallow. "Missing Me Some You" is blues sung from the perspective of a lovelorn soldier while "Cabo San Lucas" is an nth-generation Jimmy Buffett daydream gone awry. Both the soldier's lament and the beach bummer start off with promise, but the melodies quickly go flat.

The album's first single, "She Never Cried in Front of Me," might be the worst, its Journey-ish guitars stalling out at the intersection between pop-country and power-ballad mush. (Coincidentally, Jon Bon Jovi is building his new mansion there.) As Keith throws an emotive strain into his voice, the chorus quickly starts to resemble a hit by defunct pop-punkers Blink-182. (For all the copyright lawyers keeping score at home, that song is called "Dammit.")

So after 10 tepid tracks and one great one comes the sobering conclusion: Country music's biggest personality has made an album almost devoid of personality.

Does that make Toby Keith a bad guy? Worse. It makes him a boring one.

DOWNLOAD THIS:"That Don't Make Me a Bad Guy"