Startin' with Me

by Stewart Mason

A Nashville country rebel in the mold of Travis Tritt -- in other words, a defanged and marketing-driven pretty boy whose punkin head David Allan Coe or Waylon Jennings would smash a beer bottle over just on general principle -- Jake Owen makes his debut with the utterly formulaic Startin' with Me. Opening tracks "Bad in Me" and "Yee Haw" try so desperately hard to establish Owen's image as a bad-ass hellraiser that they finally become comical, and not the knowingly self-mocking Big & Rich kind of comical, either. Every note on Startin' with Me is as perfectly placed as Owen's artfully mussed hair in the reg'lar joe glamour shot on the front cover. Owen and producer Jimmy Ritchey carefully check off all the country radio clichés: Drinking ballad? Check! Cry for the good Lord's deliverance? You betcha! Leering misogyny disguised as praise for the female of the species? Got yer "Something About a Woman" right here, pal! Naturally, something so perfectly contrived can't help but be at least modestly successful on a commercial level.