Bryen Willems CD Review
Bryen Willems
Too Cold At Home
Leap Records LEAP 004
**
Disappointing retro country from Down Under via Cajun country
Louisiana-born but Australia-based Bryen Willems is one of those singers completely out-of-step with today’s music scene. Sometimes, it’s good to hear retro-music, especially if it’s well done and given a new, fresh slant. Sadly, that’s not the case with this debut album. Willems has written four new songs and chosen wisely from the catalogues of Steve Young, Johnny Paycheck, Chris Knight and Wynn Stewart. But his limited vocal ability makes the results sometimes sound like cut-rate Waylon Jennings. His version of Lonesome On’ry & Mean is taken at a gallop, losing all the soul and edginess that the song demands. He fares much better with a laconic cover of Paycheck’s 11 Months and 29 Days, but again there’s no bite to the vocal delivery—he’s supposedly a hardened criminal warning those on the outside to ‘keep their hands off his woman’ but no one’s likely to be shaking in their boots with this lacklustre threat.
His own Deep Down I’m Shallow is a predictable, up-tempo song that has gotten substantial radio attention Down Under, but it fails to compensate for probably the worse version of Just A Closer Walk With Thee and pretty dismal revival of Mark Chesnutt’s Too Cold At Home. A duet with Nicki Gillis on the old Roy Acuff classic As Long As I Live is just about the best thing on the whole album. For the rest, musically, there’s some great pickers on hand, but vocally the whole thing is pedestrian when it should be upfront and rockin’. AC