Southern Rain

For a not-quite-brief-enough moment in 1992, Billy Ray Cyrus was the biggest, most embarrassing thing in a genre that’s filled with big, embarrassing things. Now, after spending the better part of the ’90s watching his career slide predictably towards oblivion, he’s had time to contemplate his achy, breaky sins against humanity. Just the fact that he’s still willing to put out a record under his own name shows either tremendous courage or an appalling lack of shame, but after listening to Southern Rain, we’d have to give the guy some credit and go with the former. No, it’s not the second coming of Hank Williams, but there’s some surprising grit to the slow, burning title track, while a few of the other ballads are certainly serviceable. He still sounds like a fool when he tries to rock out; “We The People,” is a suitably stupid country ditty, though not on the scale of his original landmark atrocity. Mercifully, he doesn’t do it often. In the end, The Mulleted One probably benefits from having set the bar so fucking low an earthworm would have trouble squeezing under it, but with Southern Rain he gets at least some points for trying.