Long-running Texan singer/songwriter and fiddler
Doug Moreland has a taste for hot Western swing, as on the flashy opening track, "A Boy Like Me," which features some impressive fiddle and pedal steel solos. However, most of his self-titled album is in a more traditionally Nashville-oriented frame of mind, filled with weepy ballads like "Dallas" (not the
Jimmie Dale Gilmore standard, alas) and easygoing honky tonk shuffles like "Honeymoonlight" and "Not Afraid to Fall." Points should be deducted for the brief novelty "The Beer Song," however: it's a cute tune, and it undoubtedly goes down a treat live, but it's also a bald-faced ripoff of
Hank Snow's "I've Been Everywhere," and
Moreland's too talented to resort to that sort of thing. Overall,
Doug Moreland is a curiously static record, slightly enervated-sounding in a way that
Moreland's previous records were not. ~ Stewart Mason