if 1-800-DIAL-MTV still existed, would this return to the top?
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[3.75]
Josh Langhoff: Aside from certified real good album Dr. Feelgood and hearing an endless procession of kids wander into the choir room after class and start pounding “Home Sweet Home ’91” on the piano — they never made it to the chorus’s trademark flat-VI flat-VII progression, the burliest cliché in a song full of ’em — I never clicked with the Crüe. Maybe because they used the words “devil” and “hell” in a couple titles, they kept showing up as scabrous warlocks in these Rock Music is Satan’s Playground videos we’d watch at youth group. High school me would be confused and relieved to see them hailed “Nashville Outlaws” and covered by Hootie, though he just takes the “socially conscious” album closer my friend Johnny once called “the song that lets you know it’s time to change the record.” As for this one — well, Rattail Justin is a second hand bro.
[4]
Micha Cavaseno: “Without You” is the better Motley Crue ballad, Nikki Sixx is up there with Holland-Dozier-Holland (#NoKlosterman), and this hayseed clod can’t power-ballad for shit. Hit the bricks, then take the brick to your own face. I’m going to listen to Hanoi Rocks to cleanse this filth from my life.
[1]
John Seroff: A good cover song should at the very least aspire to hew to the line of the apocryphal Hippocratic Oath and do no harm. This corn pone rendition of “Home Sweet Home” dings my junior high memories of the original Mötley Crüe version by dint of twangy over-enunciation, deflation of all-important cock rock hubris in service of sentimentality, and by trotting out the vocally bedraggled Vince Neil as a half-hearted background singer-cum-hair metal mascot. It’s not as if the source material demands better treatment but this is Star Wars Special Edition levels of degrading.
[3]
Alfred Soto: As a concept this duet/cover isn’t risible. Aimed at condescending assholes who dismiss contemporary country as hair metal, the song sticks and spins its finger in their asses. But the best lack all conviction and all that. The guitar and piano sound like they were themselves Pro Tooled, which should offend those who ply their trade on the authenticity circuit, and Vince like a Guitar Center employee bumming a smoke during break.
[1]
Anthony Easton: I don’t really care about Vince Neil, and the slop over of ’80s metal and nuc-ountry has been talked about for almost a decade, and so all of the points for this, is how much fun Moore is having, and how dedicated his voice is: awkwardly fitting into the howl of guitar, but owning that as his sound. There is a certain power in a working class boy as a man being able to bend genre and using any pull that he has in order to get what he wants to do–and not even pretending (with lyrics like this) that he is even doing country anymore. This is synthesis rather than a mutual drag act.
[8]
Patrick St. Michel: It’s a cute idea, but turns out a country-fied version of “Home Sweet Home” sounds unremarkable and pretty straightforward, the unique touches (organ, choir, Justin Moore’s drawled-out voice) failing to make this more interesting.
[4]
Brad Shoup: The original’s OK, but I’ve had this clip running as a low-level process in my brain for about 20 years, so I’m fond, put it that way. It’s sturdy, but its construction is so out of fashion that it actually points to new possibilities. I mean, does Moore ever let loose on those held notes like he does here? Ask those proto-metallers about how much heaviness they conjured with an organ and a regular old drum kit. There’s a grimness here that a lot of current country dudes blow right past with their dropped tuning and their croaks. Oh, and speaking of grim, Vince is just part of the fog here, a really nice scratch vocal that made it to mastering.
[6]
Thomas Inskeep: Akin to 1994’s Common Thread: Songs of the Eagles, the new Nashville Outlaws: A Tribute to Motley Crue serves more than anything to show just how far contemporary country’s evolved these days because this makes total sense. Country is the arena-rock of 2014. “Home Sweet Home,” however, was never one of the Crue’s best songs, and Justin Moore, somehow, dumbs it down musically. Vince Neil’s backing vocals just prove how raggedly his voice is these days – and he was never a particularly strong singer. Moore provides no personality here; this might as well be a performance on American Idol‘s hair metal (or “’80s”) night, barely a notch up from karaoke.
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