BUCKY COVINGTON
Bucky Covington
Lyric Street
***
Bucky Covington's performances on American Idol last year revealed a guy graced with charisma but offered no evidence that he would wind up making the most cohesive album to come out of the franchise yet.
That's the good and the bad of American Idol. The show's theme nights draw all ages but they also do a disservice to genre-specific contestants.
This 29-year-old North Carolina native has a hard-core country voice. There's no reason he should sound convincing singing Stevie Wonder's Superstition as Idol had him doing.
The self-titled Bucky Covington (in stores Tuesday; read a profile of Covington in the Sunday Miami Herald) caters to his strengths with a batch of honest country-rockers that bear the influence of Tim McGraw and Bob Seger but on the whole are 100 percent Covington.
Covington's somewhat thin voice doesn't make him the greatest vocalist in Nashville but, more importantly, he's believable when he sings about the joys of high school football games (American Friday Night), country living (Hometown, Carolina Blue, the one song he cowrote) and old-fashioned upbringing (The Bible and the Belt). Label-mates Rascal Flatts would kill for a surefire No. 1 country radio smash like the tragic but optimistic tale of paralysis Covington details on the sentimental ballad I'll Walk. Rascal Flatts could never muster the empathy Covington conveys.
On its face, only the lead Top 30 single A Different World would seem to ring false since the performer is not yet 30 but sings with great insight about a prelitigious time in this nation when ''Not every kid made the team when they tried / We got disappointed but that was alright,'' prayer was in school after the morning pledge of allegiance and a sip from the garden hose was sheer heaven.
Yet, here, too, Covington's down-home realism and the spot-on production from Sawyer Brown's Mark Miller sells the song. Bucky Covington may not rank with all-time country classic albums like Coat of Many Colors, Killin' Time, Storms of Life, Red Headed Stranger or I Am What I Am but for blasting on the car radio, the mainstream country-rock Bucky Covington is ideal.
Pod Picks:A Different World, Ain't No Thing, Empty Handed.
http://www.miamiherald.com/275/story/71203.html
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