Rex Hobart And The Misery Boys - Your Favorite Fool

  by Geraint Jones

published: 13 / 11 / 2002

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Review

Continuing to perform and perpetuate real country music, as if they tripped in accidentally from a parallel universe - one where Nashville’s’ current misappropriation of the genre, most of it superficial AOR pap with a big hat, doesn’t exist - Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys are a vivid reminder of how good country music, the way it's supposed to be played, can be. It might not be musically that alternative as we usually perceive the term, but it’s definitely an alternative to so much of what pretends to be country music in recent years and a most welcome one at that. These songs are honest, heartbreaking, and often funny, many touching on the time-honoured themes of bars, women and broken hearts. It might sound clich¾d, but then so in all honesty is much of real life and these songs are as real as they come. If they don’t tug a heartstring or raise a smile, then damn you all to hell! What a great band too; Rex Hobart’s voice gets better and better and it was very good to begin with. J.B. Morris' incisively twangy guitar hooks and Solomon Hofer’s fluid pedal steel playing are also both excellent. Some classic country lyrics too - on opener’ ‘You’ve Got Some Cheating To Do’, Hobart pleads “So I’m begging like a devil, come down to my level, hurt me like I’m hurting you”. Elsewhere, country music must have been invented to accommodate titles like ‘Take It Back (Before You Mean It)’ and ‘Gotta Get Back To Forgetting You’, which sound as wonderful as you’d expect. Add to that the album’s sole cover, a duet with Kelly Hogan on ‘Golden Ring, and ‘Your Favorite Fool’ is simply too good to resist, so my advice is don’t!

Track Listing:-

1 You've Got Some Cheating to Do
2 Your Favorite Fool
3 Take it Back (Before You Mean It)
4 Gotta Get Back to Forgetting You
5 Golden Ring
6 I Don't Feel It Anymore
7 Promise to be Honest
8 Let's Just Call it Love
9 Another Bad Habit of Mine
10 I Should Be Gone By Now