Parker McCollum is an up and coming Austin-based country
rocker. His debut, The Limestone Kid, is a captivating mix of sounds,
immediately familiar to fans of Texas Red Dirt country, but full of a great
sense of energy that pushes this collection past whatever genre label you’d
want to apply. McCollum’s songs are made for radio, made for driving, but
there’s also a touch of melancholy that puts him in some pretty interesting
shared company as a songwriter. Think, really handsome cowboy poet, strumming
away outside church, not really taking part in the service, but well aware of
all that talk about sin and redemption. McCollum moves deftly from soul-tinged
tales of heartbreak to rockers burning with country twang. His take on
Americana covers a lot of landscape and he avoids the stereotypical lyrical and
imagistic content so much ‘new’ country seems to traffic in. Despite his young
age, McCollum is rooted not only in an old soul’s world view, but his sound has
a distressed, age-worn feel that makes the music a little timeless, in the
very best way.
McCollum has had some success with “Meet You in the Middle”,
a perfectly penned bit of breakup poetry, talking about being left behind, and
having to deal with all the parts of life that don’t seem to stop for
heartache or the lowliness of feeling like you’ve been screwed over. I love how the
song deals with an angry bout of loneliness, but set to a soaring soundtrack of
pedal steel, a rolling lead guitar rollickingly picked like a banjo line, and a
tempo that rises and falls in a mimic of the narrator’s emotional ebb and flow
between sadness and strange optimism as he tries to catch up, but never gets that far.
The Limestone Kid
is a fantastic album from a songwriter with a literary, poetic bent and a knack
for writing the kind of songs that could fall into multiple musical categories
and fit right in. This is country, to be sure, but it goes beyond the trappings
of Texas and Nashville to traverse a landscape of McCollum’s own tuneful, addictively singalong-worthy design. This is a road trip collection of songs, and you'll be glad for taking the ride.
