Consumer Guide Album

Garth Brooks: In Pieces [Liberty, 1993]
His crusade against the used-CD scourge puts him up there with Rudy Giuliani on the ever-growing list of public figures who could have gone either way and promptly went that, and like Rudy, he wants the world to know that he has no use for the welfare crowd. Nor is his music getting any purer. But it is getting Garther, which means it may soon approach wonder-of-nature status--if there's anybody trying to stuff bigger emotions into a song, he or she is a lot crazier than this professional entertainer. As garish as their titles, "Standing Outside the Fire" and "The Red Strokes" won't convert skeptics. But that kind of middle-class heat is what he's about. When he calls his Baton Rouge honey every hundred miles, you can feel his dick throbbing--probably even if you don't have one yourself, which is of course the idea. And when he constructs a soap-opera plot about how an adultery connects to a random suicide, he enters passion's twilight zone. A−