Consumer Guide Album

James Talley: Tryin' Like the Devil [Capitol, 1976]
Something about this record as a whole is slightly off--maybe it's Talley's humorlessness, or maybe it's that his voice is much better suited to the startling talky intimacy of his first record than to the belting bravado with which he asserts his ambitions this time. But every song works individually, and an audacious concept--returning a consciously leftish analysis to the right-leaning populism of country music--is damn near realized in utterly idiomatic songs like "40 Hours" and "Are They Gonna Make Us Outlaws Again?" It belts good enough. A-