Confidence can make or break any album, and in Marc Miner’s debut offering Smile When You’re Wasted, it’s the catalyst for some of the record’s most profound moments, such as the otherwise poetically heart-wrenching “Nothing Good Bout the Way I Live” and uncompromisingly rocking “Border Town Bar.” Miner doesn’t want to run with any particular crowd in Smile When You’re Wasted; on the contrary, he’s setting forth his own style of outlaw country in tunes like the churning “Everything but Modest” and rather sophisticated “Easy Street,” skewing familiar themes with experimental concepts that some purists would foolishly say belong on the sidelines.
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If you’re looking for a songwriter who is going to adhere to the compositional rules of a bygone era, there’s no question whether or not Marc Miner isn’t a match for you – his work is far too flexible and, for that matter, far too endeared to the wit and wisdom of rock n’ roll, folk and even pop music to fit inside of a box, and for some of us, that makes his one of the cooler LPs we’re going to hear this fall.
Despite its title, “Empty Bottle Blues” isn’t entirely indebted to the Delta school, but instead straddles the line between country and blues that has long been abandoned by some of the biggest names in Nashville these days. Where “Sweet Codeine” is as true to the outlaw tradition as a composition can get without being a straight-up homage, other songs like the balladic “Strip You Down” and small indie star “Over” are much harder to describe using the conventional terminology that a lot of critics have come to depend on when fielding new releases in any particular era or genre.
This is a unique time for singer/songwriters, and for Marc Miner, I think he couldn’t have picked a more optimal moment to be making his debut in Smile When You’re Wasted – hybridity has never been quite as trendy as it is this autumn, but moreover, his lack of interest in following the same journey so many of his forerunners did is quite the turn-on for millennial audiences around the globe.
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From the moment we press play and get introduced to the sizzle of “Warm Welcome” firsthand, through the introspective stampede that takes us into “Whiskey & Weed” and finally wrapping things up in “Last Words,” Marc Miner gives us some of the best country songcraft I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing in the year 2020 from any artist in or outside of the United States.
As usual, the underground is doing one heck of a number on the mainstream in terms of creative intelligence, and if Miner can help to break a lot of his fellow European country players through on this side of the world, I think that the genre would benefit for it tremendously in the long run. The notion of scenes is as archaic as phone booths, and an international player like this guy is, in more ways than one, exactly what the doctor ordered this October.
Gwen Waggoner
