If Bright Eyes has, at times, been the Hank Williams of indie-country-- sonically hardscrabble, unadorned, and resolutely traditional-- then Blake Sennett must be its Kenny Chesney. His music with the Elected is just that affable, outrageously fun in a schmaltzy way, spit-polished, and trouser-creased. Sun, Sun, Sun is a modern pop simulacrum of traditional country, devoid of the electro accents that pocked the last Elected record, pretty delectable as long as you've a strong taste for ham.
If Sun can even be called Country & Western, the emphasis should be firmly planted on the dextral side of the ampersand, given the songs' bright and spotless Califormica surfaces. As Sennett dreamily contemplates getting away from something or other, the jolly melancholy of "Would You Come with Me" is telegraphed by silvery string-bends gliding through its gentle twang; "It was Love" glints with moony lap-steel courtesy of Mike...Bloom (thought I was going to say "Mogis", didn't you?). If the emotions are earnest, the glitzy presentation makes them seem fake in the same way that Las Vegas plasticizes desire. But the swoony pop frissons come fast and often enough that you don't really have to dwell on it.
By combining the penetrating wussiness and mincing prosody of Elliott Smith with the emo theatrics and big sappy choruses of Conor Oberst (check out the sculpted, harmony-drenched surges of "Not Going Home"), Sennett has turned out an album of sparkly country slow-dances that sound at once utterly artificial and genuinely beguiling. "Did Me Good" is genre exercise in charming kitsch, with its barrelhouse pianos, jaunty organs, and saxophone-flourishes answering Sennett's titular refrain. It's winning in a way that seems canned, an emotional laugh-track, and it's hard to not feel a little violated by its relentless pageantry.
Sennett's aesthetic is less problematic when he sticks to maudlin anglicanisms: "But man I loved/ Yeah I loved/ When I loved/ It was love." Simple and credible, endearingly obvious and courageously scoffable. This is country music that mythologizes the affluent 'burbs and their attendant heartaches more than those of impoverished backwater outposts, and when Sennett sings faux-soulful lines like "That's all right, Jack", it scans as equal parts young-white-dude-irony and young-white-dude-longing-for-authentic-experience, which isn't necessarily an attractive combination. But for what it's worth, while it seems as if the former child-actor has only outgrown half of the hyphenation, the aforementioned conflict is probably the realest thing to be found on Sun, Sun, Sun.
