Review: BR5-49, Dog Days

The string of roster changes that have plagued BR5-49 throughout their decade-long career—seriously, Destiny’s Child has nothing on these guys—finally catches up to the band, now a quartet, on Dog Days. What was so interesting about the earlier incarnations of BR5-49 was that they were able to retain a distinctive, rambunctious artistic identity regardless of who was playing on their very good to great records. Dog Days, which certainly isn’t a bad album by any stretch, loses that identity for much of its length.

Chuck Mead is still a charismatic singer and multi-instrumentalist Don Herron is still given a handful of opportunities to show off, but BR5-49’s arrangements—the fearlessness of which has always been the band’s selling point—on songs like “Leave It Alone” and “I’m Going Down” border on being bland. Even on Dog Days’s riskier numbers, such as the wonderfully oddball “Let Jesus Make You Breakfast” and a cover of Tim Carroll’s “After The Hurricane” that’s given serious heft post-Katrina, there’s this safety and simplicity to John Keane’s production that does little to distinguish a band that’s built its reputation on its go-for-broke combo of traditional country forms and rock-star swagger.

Mead’s songwriting is occasionally inspired (“Bottom of Priority” is a heady, confrontational story-song about Native American activist and political prisoner Leonard Peltier), which is hardly a surprise, but that makes it all the more disappointing that so much of Dog Days sounds like a better-than-average Brooks & Dunn album. Here’s hoping that the current roster of BR5-49 simply needed to get one album out of the way to get the mojo back.