Jake Owen Albums (2)
What The Critics Say
Everything about Jake Owen is a testament to Nashville's image of an everyday all-American. He has an ordinary name, he's hunky but not threatening, he has facial hair as sculpted as his biceps, he has a warm, friendly voice that is as suited for sentiment as it is for hoisting a frosty bottle of American beer. There's not a thing that's surprising about Jake Owen, either on his 2006 debut or this, his 2009 follow-up, that replicates the formula of his first to the letter, going so far as to offer a new version of "Eight Second Ride," presumably following the assumption that if it produced a modest success the first time around, things will get better the next time. Musically, that's pretty much true: Easy Does It gets the balance of sports bar anthems, radio ballads, and Sunday sentiment right, hitting every cliché perhaps a bit too on the nose but effectively nonetheless. Complaining that this is a bit too familiar is beside the point because this is music meant to be familiar, to fit into pre-carved niches for Friday nights and Monday mornings, and it works not because the songs are great -- at their best they're sturdy, at their worst they're workaday -- but because the production is clean and uncluttered, focused directly on Jake Owen's warm, welcoming voice. Owen doesn't really look like a guy next door -- he's too hunky by far -- but he does sound like the homecoming king from a small town, a guy comfortable with posing in the spotlight without looking like he's posing, and it's this easy charm that turns Easy Does It into an effective piece of country-pop product. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
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. ~ Stewart Mason, All Music Guide
