Sold Date: April 1, 2017
Start Date: March 15, 2017
Final Price: $22.95 (USD)
Seller Feedback: 19276
Buyer Feedback: 45

This record is brand new and has never been played.

Church has been making car-radio singalongs for a long time. He’s been an arena-country star for years, and for most of his career, he’s done the things that arena-country stars are supposed to do. He’s built up his name an album at a time, getting a few singles per album to land and gradually building up a headlining set’s worth of bulletproof anthems. He’s put out songs with other country stars. He’s toured arenas, mostly in the parts of the country with robust country radio stations, though he’s also headlined Madison Square Garden and played the odd rock festival here and there. He’s shown flashes of rebellion. He had a big single with “Smoke A Little Smoke,” a song that helped make songs about weed safe for country radio, a bigger thing than you might expect. He named one of his biggest songs after Bruce Springsteen, rather than Hank Williams or whoever. He got himself kicked off of a Rascal Flatts tour for stretching his set out way too long when he opened for them in New York. But for the most part, he excelled at big, beery, soaring fists-up songs, songs that would get played on album-rock radio if country hadn’t absorbed everything that once made album-rock radio so great. He did his job, and he was good at it. But with The Outsiders, things changed. That album’s opening title track sounded like Muse and Metallica getting together to cover the Marshall Tucker Band. And while the album never reached that level of amazing stadium-rock lunacy again, it did have all these delightfully strange touches, like the jug-band funk rhythms all over “Cold One.” (Church says they were inspired by Fiona Apple.) He also had a howling multi-song suite about how Nashville is the devil, and when he played it live, a giant 40-foot inflatable devil would suddenly appear in the crowd. The Outsiders marked the moment that Church went from much-better-than-average country star to unpredictable arena king. The Outsiders sold a ton of copies and maybe helped country pull itself out of the goofy party-pop rut it had been driving itself into. It was an important album.
In a lot of ways, Mr. Misunderstood is a logical step after The Outsiders. With the last album, Church threw down the gauntlet. He carved a space for himself in the world. And now he’s free to just be. Label suits are not going to second-guess all his impulses, and that means he can just relax into the kind of music he wants to make. The album has no grandly messy experimental headfucks like “The Outsiders.” But it also doesn’t have any songs that beg to be thrown into rotation on country radio, though at least a few will certainly end up there. This feels like an album put together quickly by people who knew what they were doing, which is almost certainly what it is. It hasn’t been focus-grouped or road-tested. And while so many Nashville records have that antiseptic session-musician gleam to them, this is unmistakably the work of a group of musicians who know each other very well and who like working in a room together. Church and his band spent 20 days in the studio working on the album, which makes this basically a basement-hardcore demo by Nashville standards. He used Jay Joyce, the guy who’s produced all of his albums (as well as, like, a couple of Cage The Elephant LPs and the last Fidlar album). The album does have big-name guests, but they come from the jammy roots-rock world: Susan Tedeschi, who impersonates a raging tornado on the duet “Mixed Drinks About Feelings,” and Carolina Chocolate Drops singer Rhiannon Giddens, singing backup on “Kill A Word.”
The point of these songs isn’t really the lyrics, which are largely pretty dumb. (Church mentions the blues more often than your dad when he discovered the White Stripes.) The point, instead, is the ridiculous capacity for groove that this band has. “Chattanooga Lucy” has tribal-funk congas and itchy acoustic guitars and squelchy organs and howling gospel choirs and a huge four-on-the-floor drum stomp that only kicks in when the song is halfway done. It also has Church hitting this crazy twanged-out falsetto that he should reach for more often. It’s like a decades-late contribution to those great Light In The Attic Country Funk compilations. “Knives Of New Orleans” is a goofily strident slow-build rocker about being hunted by police after committing murder. (I’d love to hear the Mountain Goats cover it, if only to hear what John Darnielle would do with the climactic “I did what I did! / I have no regrets!” bleat.) “Record Year” is a pun-happy lament about spending post-breakup months immersing yourself in James Brown and Hank Williams and Songs In The Key Of Life, and it does quiet to loud in an efficient gears-changing way that screams professionalism rather than catharsis.
And just like The Outsiders, this one opens with its title track, which serves as a sort of statement of intent. Except where The Outsiders aimed to explode Church’s frame of reference outward in every direction, this one looks inward. Church drops the names of country-music outsider-appreciators like Elvis Costello and Jeff Tweedy, and he sings about tattoos and gin and Jackson Pollock. But he’s mostly singing about trying to figure out how to be himself in an environment that never really encouraged that. He’s singing to his teenage self, and to teenagers who were like him, holding out the example of his own country-rock stardom less as this distant “Jukebox Hero” dream and more as a comforting end goal. And it builds to this colossal na-na-na singalong and triple-guitar flare-up that just kills me everytime. “They tried to file my points, sand my edges, and I just grew out my hair,” Church sings. But now that he’s made the point that nobody’s going to sand his edges, he’s free to relax into an album of comfortable, worn-in Southern rock like this. It’s not an opus, the way The Outsiders was. It’s a casual and relatively soft-spoken piece of work. But after listening to almost nothing else for the past few days, I feel like it’ll have the same staying power as The Outsiders did. -Tom Breihan
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