Cowboy Town (Arista Nashville, 2007)

If your idea of a cowboy is Cowboy Troy and the guys from Big & Rich, then sure, this new Brooks & Dunn album is named appropriately. For it's the city-bred hat crowd that the majority of these songs are aimed at or at least the women that married them. Their last couple of albums saw them gain some critical acclaim with songs like the stirring "Believe," but there's nothing that immediately memorable here. Instead, we get the fuzzy current events theology of, "God Must Be Busy" and some generic populist anthems like the first single, "Proud Of the House We Built."

There are bright spots, but they're mostly lighter fare like "Drunk On Love" and the retro-rocker, "Tequila" or in tributes like "Johnny Cash Junkie (Buck Owens Freak)" or "Ballad Of Jerry Jeff Walker." It's more than a little ironic that country music's biggest selling duo is singing about artists who don't get played on country radio any more, even if they did talk Walker into singing along.