Comin' To Your City (Warner, 2005)

Big & Rich opens its second full-length CD with the sing-along line, "Somebody's got to be unafraid to lead the freak parade." It next offers up "a little bang in your yin yang," presumably to support its position as this oddball parade's grand marshal. Later in this title track, it brags of scaring the hell out of Marilyn Manson, which is hardly a believable statement: Big$Rich may be a little extreme when lined up next to the rest of conservative mainstream country music, but there are scores of freakier super freaks in the rock and rap world.

Speaking of the un-freaky, "Never Mind Me" is a dead ringer for the soft rock Seals & Crofts gave us back in the '70s, and "Jalapeno" is derivative of Charlie Daniels' country-rock. Big$Rich is most effective when it briefly steps away from its freak zone for the empathetic "I Pray For You," but it is at its most annoying during the farfetched jet plane sex romp of "Caught Up In The Moment." In the end, even diehard parade lovers may not want to follow Big$Rich's country Doo Dah lead here.