You never feel more British than when perusing the Billboard Country Chart. It's packed with people you've never heard of, all selling millions while apparently locked in a tooth-and-nail struggle to come up with the least persuasive album title of all time. Thecurrent undisputed bad-title champion – though he faces stiff competition from Billy Currington (Little Bit of Everything) and Brooks andDunn (Number Ones … and Then Some) – seems to be a bloke called Luke Bryan, who released a debut called I'll Stay Me, thus reassuring fans who feared he was planning to undergo intimate surgery and re-emerge as a disco singer called Lucinda Brysexual. He followed it up with an album called Doin' My Thing and in between had a hitwith his single We Rode in Trucks, which seems a bit like releasing a single called We Went to Homebase, or We Ate Some Crisps.
Elsewhere, there's Danny Gokey, Lady Antebellum, Gary Allan, the Zac Brown Band, Colt Ford, Kellie Pickler. InAmerica, these names are a veritable Who's Who: in Britain, they're more of aWho's That? Your sense of puzzlement is bolstered by the kind of things these mysterious names get up to. A band called Sugarland struck big with a baffling looky-here-y'all cover of the Dream Academy's none-more-English 80s hit Life in a Northern Town. Whatever next? Perhaps Rascal Flatts might yet wow the good ol' boys with aversion of Billy Bragg's From a Vauxhall Velox.
It's all testament to the UK's enduring resistance to country and western. We will pay due homage to the historical greats: Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Gram Parsons. There are certainly takers for that brand of country rock known as Americana, albeit largely middle-aged men who seem to have decided life doesn't have much left to offer them and are now intent on slowly boring themselves to death with their own record collections. But there's virtually no British audience for mainstream country music.
That may be about to change as a result of I and Love and You, the major label debut by North Carolina's Avett Brothers. Admittedly, they're not a product of the Nashville establishment – they released a string of albums on tiny independent labels before being taken under the hairy wing of producer Rick Rubin – and their sound is less glossy than that of the Stetson massive, with whom you suspect the Avett Brothers would take umbrage at being compared. Nevertheless, it's no less fixated on mainstream success. It makes no bones about its desire to fill stadiums and sell in quantities that would give Luke Bryan momentary pause from doin' his thing. "They said, 'Don't take your business to the big time' – I bought us tickets there," they sing on Slight Figure of Speech, to a backing that sets up camp somewhere between Americana and the Billboard Country Chart. Back home at least, their dreams appear to be coming true: they were picked as one of Rolling Stone's Bands to Watch in 2010, and I and Love and You crashed into the US top 20.
Ironically, Slight Figure of Speech is one of the few tracks from which you get a sense of the frantic, punky energy that apparently fuelled their earlier albums: it barrels along, driven by a kind of pre-pot Beatles raucousness. But I and Love and You's stock in trade is a slowly building acoustic ballad of quite startling earnestness and sincerity. By contrast, Snow Patrol are masters of the ironically co*cked eyebrow and the knowing wink. "I want to have friends who love me for the man I become, not the man I was," offers The Perfect Space. The Avett Brothers keep saying things like that, which means thealbum's strengths – powerful melodies, exquisite fraternal harmonies, Rubin's tasteful production – tend to be drowned out by the fear that, at any minute, they might tell you there's no I in team.
The British public may well embrace this Kentucky Fried Coldplay routine with a warmth they deny Lady Antebellum and the Zac Brown Band: itcertainly seems less alien than Sugarland yee-hawing their way through the Dream Academy's back catalogue. But if you feel that the world doesn't really need any more earnest, slowly building ballads at this particular juncture in history, you might find thealbum most appealing when it occasionally tries something else: the relatively upbeat Tin Man – which features a tuba – or Kick Drum Heart's hoarse vocals and pounding piano. The finest moment may be when Laundry Room unexpectedly abandons the blueprint after three and half minutes and explodes into a thrilling bluegrass coda. At that moment, I and Love and You sounds like a band suddenly doing what they want to, rather than what they think they should.
