Paul Cauthen – Country Coming Down [LP]

Want to get a bead on Paul Cauthen?

Good freakin’ luck — especially on his third album, COUNTRY COMING DOWN.

COUNTRY COMING DOWN has been in motion awhile, actually. The title track, one of several co-writes with good Nashville pal Aaron Raitiere, has been around since before Cauthen’s dark sophomore album ROOM 41. Its sense of campfire calm and “damn near off the map” idyll set a bar, for both music and lifestyle, that Cauthen aspired to, while the rest of the new album, recorded at Modern Electric Sound Recorders in Dallas with regular collaborators Beau Bedford (Texas Gentlemen) and Jason Burt (Medicine Man Revival), shows that Cauthen was able to get there without losing any of the playful “hot dog holly golly dagnabit” good-time spirit that rolls off his tongue like a tumbleweed in the west Texas panhandle.

If you want to know what COUNTRY COMING DOWN sounds like, tuck into the album’s sonic array, an austere, sinewy attack tha