Chris Cagle

The headline of the press release reads, "Special Chris Cagle sampler -- created specifically for music journalists!" In Nashville, the lag time between the release of an advance single from a new album and the appearance of the album itself can be as much as six months, and with Cagle's single "What Kinda Gone" rising in the country chart in the fall of 2007, the publicity department of Capitol Records Nashville apparently thought it might be a good idea to remind writers that Cagle has been scoring country hits since the summer of 2000 by compiling a promotional CD featuring all of his Top 30 singles to date. Cagle has an attractive tenor, and he is equally at home with honky tonk rockers and cry-in-your-beer ballads, but he is not a sufficiently distinctive singer to rise above his material; he needs great songs to be most effective. Occasionally, he gets them. Sometimes it seems that if a country song is good enough, you almost don't need to hear it. The title alone may tell you everything. Then, of course, the song has to live up to that name. Cagle's ballad hit "I Breathe In, I Breathe Out" is a great country song in that sense, and both the actual song and his performance live up to what's suggested in that title. "Chicks Dig It" sounds like it could be another one, but somehow the song isn't as good as the name. For the most part, Cagle delivers these songs well, and with three (soon to be four) albums under his belt, he is ready for a greatest-hits collection, as this preliminary cut suggests. One problem though. As the music journalist listens to the disc, something is wrong. That boxy sound, with the limited frequency range and the muddy mid-range -- why, this CD sounds like a bunch of MP3s! Maybe the publicists figured that music journalists (like so much of America these days, or so it seems) couldn't tell the difference or wouldn't care, but the next time the flacks want to do the critics a favor, they might start by not specially creating a sampler by mastering the tracks off their iPods! ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide