The Singles Jukebox

HOUSER NOT A HOMER

[Video][Website]
[5.10]

Anthony Easton: 20 Other Places That Country Couples Can Fuck That Is Not the Back of a Pickup Truck (Because We Have Done That): 1) the crick, 2) the creek, 3) the muddin’ hole, 4) the duck blind, 5) the deer blind, 6) the changing room at the Bass Pro Shop outlet store, 7) a tent in the back forty, 8) a tent in the back country, 9) a tent in the backyard, 10) a tent in the back corner of Cabela’s, 11) a hayloft, 12) a haypile, 13) a choir loft, 14) the locker room of a high school gym after practice, 15) truck stops, 16) rest stops, 17) their actual gosh-darned bedroom 18) the Mobile Red Roof Inn off I-65, 19) a booth at IHOP, 20) a washroom at Shoney’s.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Shrewd of this bruiser to pivot around an oh-oh-oh chorus and chugtastic guitars, and despite the B-list Toby Keithisms he’s a horndog without panting about it.
[6]

Josh Langhoff: Houser stands astride his genre like… no, not Colossus… not even like that Superman statue down in Metropolis, Illinois… well, it’ll come to me. In his first #1 hit “How Country Feels,” he and his rough manhood were country itself, and he negotiated the hollers and hills of Girl’s body with rakish care, total Neruda shit. His album How Country Feels contains a neat four-song stretch where he and Girl personify music in various meta ways. Now he’s back, he and Girl occupy the night, the universe gauges time’s passage by their lovemaking, the crickets chirp the frequencies of their orgasms, and heaven itself nods approval. Lest I sound more approving than I actually am, I should also note that Houser’s album is too long, most of this stuff’s been done to death, and if you add a space to his name you get “Randy Ho User.”
[6]

Brad Shoup: OH MY GOD “you’re pretty enough.” Randy’s neg game is on point. And so is that 2010s pop-rock “whoa” thing. Shame about The Game tho :(
[3]

Ian Mathers: That veneer of “country” signifiers gets thinner every year, doesn’t it?
[4]

Crystal Leww: I don’t feel like any part of this should work, especially not the corny “oaaaaah!”s and especially not the line “tick tock, now we’re knocking on midnight”, but nonetheless, I am having a really good time listening to it! 
[6]

Will Adams: I didn’t think One Direction’s country move would come so soon.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: It’s usually the women who get dismissed as pop-country, despite everyone sharing songwriters with everyone else and their crossovers aimed at least a decade ago, when pop was more pop-rock. (Kara Dioguardi writes a lot of country these days; Ryan Tedder could be next.) Here’s a corrective: check the big crashing drums, the whoa-ohs, the places where it almost turns into “TiK ToK” or “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” Unfortunately, spotting these was more engaging than yet another truckside tryst.
[5]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: “Runnin’ Outta Moonlight” needs a lot more in the vocal hook department, falling on flatfooted nothing lyricism about trucks/lights/snooze/zzzzz that lay bare Houser’s songwriting limitations and leave his vocal performance feeling stilted. Thank God Houser and his Nashville-industry hitmaking machine came together like Voltron to made the music interesting, crafting a piece of studio-glossed Nashville pop in the process. “Moonlight” verges on the skeletal at moments with its anthemic-rain-flying-off-the-snare-drum-HDTV-demo-in-slow-motion rhythm section: delayed guitar licks fade away, leaving plenty of open space for Lonnie Wilson’s playing to r-e-v-e-r-b-e-r-a-t-e. Elsewhere, it’s quadruple-tracked Housers bellowing “whoa”s or drunk-on-sparklers guitar solos that step up to the plate, momentarily grasping the anthem status Houser’s songwriting can only hint at.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: I’m just enough of a masculinist 80s boy to respond viscerally to a Mellencampian “whoah-oh-oh” even if the specific content surrounding it doesn’t do much to justify the reaching-for-the-sky bravado.
[6]