Here and Now

by Stephen Thomas Erlewine"I got drunk in Raleigh and I played too long/Word got back to Nashville before I got back home/The record label said, 'Boy, you better straighten up your act'/The lawyers told me, 'Son, that's what the contracts say'/So I got good and sober and I stayed that way/Still you couldn't find a Worley record on the rack/I did everything they asked me to do/And still they went and cut me loose" — that's how Darryl Worley begins Here and Now, his fourth album and the follow-up to his huge debut, Have You Forgotten?, whose post-9/11 anthem made Worley a brief sensation in the early days of the Iraqi War. "Do You Remember" made Worley omnipresent for a while there — the song was on the radio, scorned by liberals, and embraced by Republicans — which would seem to be enough to guarantee Worley another shot at a major label, but if the story he lays out on "Jumpin' off the Wagon" is even a quarter true, he wasn't ready to play by the rules — which isn't necessarily the same thing as being a bona fide outlaw. Worley pretty much plays by the rebel handbook, swaggering to a blueprint as he rocks his country just enough to not be pop but not enough to truly surprise. Frankly, he's just a bit too well groomed — not just in image but in sound — to have this outsized outlaw persona fit, as his voice isn't muscled enough, all the guitars are bit too well scrubbed, and the rhythms are just a bit too clean and tight. That said, Here and Now is a significant step forward for Worley, because even he doesn't feel as gritty as he'd like to be — it's not quite the "country music with a nasty groove" that he sings about on "Party Song" (which is itself a dead ringer for the Faces' immortal end-of-the-party anthem "Had Me a Real Good Time" — he's not only more fun in this incarnation, but his songs are generally stronger too, particularly that statement of purpose "Jumpin' off the Wagon," which provides him with a mission statement that he valiantly tries to fulfill here. If he doesn't quite do it, at least he's headed in the right direction.