Toby Keith - "Shock'n Y'all"

[StevePulaski]

Shock'n Y'all (2003)
By: Toby Keith

Rating: ★★½

Shock'n Y'all may be Toby Keith's most inconsistent album I have yet to hear, which is upsetting considering the promise it had from its first single/first track on the album. "I Love This Bar," to this day, is one of Keith's biggest hits; a masterful tune about Keith, a passive observer of humanity inside one of his favorite bars one crowded Saturday night. "We got winners, we got losers, chainsmokers, and boozers," Keith sings, with his deep, macho, baritone voice that makes you feel as if the smell of beer and the air of cigarette smoke is wafting around you while you listen to the song. Following that hit up are a hodgepodge of hit and miss tunes, concluding with two live songs, as Keith's album so often do, that are downright peculiar and unlike anything Keith has ever done musically.

Shock'n Y'all's best hits are ones that never came close to being successful, much less singles. Those are songs like "Don't Leave, I Think I Love You," a powerhouse tune about a man recalling the one that got away from him right when it's too late, and "Nights I Can't Remember, Friends I'll Never Forget," an all too close-to-home track for many of us, about those long nights with people we hold near and dear to our hearts despite the events of such night slipping our minds.

Keith gets passive-aggressive on "The Critic," which seems directed at any music critic who has given his album a poor review but turned around and gave a band "nobody knows" a glowing review (because there's no way they're good if the mainstream public has never heard about them, right?). While it's a questionable track, acoustic and glacial-paced, it's not as bad as songs like the annoying "Sweet," with its vocal/instrumental fluctuations when the titular word is spoken and "If I Was Jesus," which just misses the mark entirely.

If not for "I Love This Bar," Shock'n Y'all is arguably most known for "American Soldier," an okay country tune about the life of a typical soldier on the frontlines for the United States. Listening to this album in its entirety in the present day reminds us how deeply patriotic and outspoken Keith used to be before (around 2007) mellowing out and sticking to traditional country sounds and lyrics, as well as experimenting. His fanbase likely enjoyed Shock'n Y'all at the time for its down-home safeness, but after hearing what Keith could do in the early-to-mid 1990's and the later 2000's, Shock'n Y'all doesn't cut it by any stretch.

Recommended tracks (in order): "I Love This Bar," "Nights I Can't Remember, Friends I'll Never Forget," "Don't Leave, I Think I Love You," and "American Soldier."