Cowboy Troy - Loco Motive

Genre country Publisher Warner Bros. External Links Official Site Warner Nashville

Cowboy Troy made his first big appearance on last year's Big & Rich debut album Horse of a Different Color, spitting a multilingual verse in "Rollin' (The Ballad of Big & Rich)" that identified him as "a big, black cowboy" and "a Texas hick." Loco Motive, Troy's debut album, is thus another entry in the sparse, but growing catalog of hick-hop records.

Opener "I Play Chicken With The Train" is a raucous sprint through the musical sources of the whole album: rap, country, and rock, all outsized as befitting Troy's Texas origins. "Rolling like thunder onto the scene / it's kinda hard to describe, if you know what I mean," raps Troy. What's hard is to describe the kind of leap it takes for someone raised in an environment where it's perfectly acceptable to define broad musical taste as liking "everything but rap and country" to come around to this fusion of the Others. Big & Rich partially blazed a trail through the mainstream last year, and they make plenty of appearances here with backing vocals and writing and producing credits, but Troy's rapping adds another ingredient to their country stew. For the authenticity-obsessed, the rapping is a second strike after the deceitful curveball of Nashville pop(ulist)-country: it doesn't come from an urban, "keepin' it real" background, but dangerously flirts with novelty.

It is a novelty, partly because Troy isn't an exceptional rapper, but mostly because no one else is doing it. But novelty should not be a value judgement, because once the songs are accepted for what they are, they can also be appreciated. "Crick In My Neck" and "Ain't Broke Yet" are clever, entertaining ditties about problems likely to befall the record's presumable audience of straight males, even if their choruses suffer from too much repetition. But "If You Don't Wanna Love Me" uses its chorus, sung by Sarah Buxton, stunningly well as the link between a series of heartbreak vignettes delivered by Troy in a perfectly easy-going manner reminiscent of the Geto Boys' "Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta." "My Last Yee Haw" adds a dance element by instructing listeners "if you don't know, better ask somebody / get on the floor and grab that hottie" over an excitingly menacing guitar rave-up. Tim McGraw lends his voice for the religious ballad "Somebody's Smilin' On Me," but "Automatic" treads on the profane with its character study of an icy bar queen who "turns on when she wants to," and its chunky, Alice In Chairs-esque riffs courtesy of Big & Rich's guitarist Adam Schoenfeld.

Loco Motive straddles country and rap by leveraging a healthy dose of rock and by producing individual songs that borrow elements of each to tell a story or paint a picture. Troy can speak different languages-- Spanish on "El Tejano," a dozen including Mandarin, Russian, and Japanese on "Wrap Around the World" -- but it's the combination of different musical languages that purist genre fans will have a hard time getting into. But musical miscegenation is a reality and demands to be evaluated on its own merits, especially when the results are promising, as they are on Loco Motive.