The ninth studio album by Shooter Jennings begins in very much the way you might expect an album by the son of country legend Waylon Jennings to begin. Country stars have always been big on flaunting their dynastic connections – not for Nashville the don’t-ask-about-my-parents approach favoured by rock star offspring who enter the family business – and Jennings Jr has been no exception.
He has toured with his late father’s backing band the Outlaws; his last album release consisted of archive recordings of him performing with his father eight years before the latter’s death. It isn’t a huge surprise that the first voice you hear this time around belongs to his old man: what better way for Shooter Jennings to pledge undying fealty to the credo of outlaw country – the roughhouse sub-genre his father helped define 50 years ago – than by kicking off proceedings with a burst of his old hit Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand?
But a minute in, things start to go wildly off-piste. The sound of Waylon Jennings wryly recounting the saga of a late-70s drug bust is gradually joined by a selection of euphoric electronics: a burbling arpeggio, gusts of reverb-drenched noise, stammering EDM breakdown synths. Within two minutes, they’ve consumed the track entirely: the drums have relaxed into a dancefloor pulse, there are vocoders and an old-fashioned analogue synth picking out the kind of melody you might expect to hear on a late-70s Jean Michel Jarre album. Three minutes later, the track has turned into a cover of Giorgio Moroder’s wistful 1977 disco smash From Here to Eternity.
Welcome to the world of Shooter Jennings, a man who gives every impression of being on a singlehanded mission to keep country music as weird as possible. His discography is a bizarre alternate universe in which songs called things like Daddy’s Farm and This Ol’ Wheel rub shoulders with Nine Inch Nails- and Pink Floyd-inspired dystopian concept albums about eugenics and the new world order that feature horror author Stephen King playing a character called Will o’ the Wisp; where the aforementioned collaborative album with his father was released simultaneously with a single of Jennings reading short stories about the occult; and where you can follow up a tribute to the late country star George Jones with a tribute to Giorgio Moroder.
As you might expect, Shooter Jennings parted company with Nashville’s major-label mainstream some time ago, but even ensconced on his own label, Black Country Rock – its name nicked from David Bowie, apparently a big influence – the Moroder project proved difficult to get off the ground. His label’s distributor somehow arrived at the conclusion that a country star recording a tribute to the Italian electronic music pioneer – in which songs from Moroder’s oeuvre are interspersed with inexplicable snatches of film dialogue and ruminations on virtual reality, and which involves cameo appearances from septuagenarian outlaw country singer Steve Young, Marilyn Manson and video game developer Richard “Lord British” Garriot – was, as Jennings ruefully put it, “a dumb idea”.
In absolute fairness, you can see why they thought that. On paper, the album’s cocktail of country rock, electronica and the unmistakable influence of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories – the album’s version of 1978 instrumental The Chase is overlaid with Garriot discussing his work in Giorgio By Moroder style – looks like a disaster waiting to happen: a latterday equivalent of Neil Young’s ungainly attempt to scrabble aboard the 80s electro-pop bandwagon Trans. But the most bizarre thing about Countach isn’t its concept or its supporting cast list but how well it works.
One might argue that’s largely down to Moroder himself: his legendary reputation might be founded on his electronic innovations, but he was also a fantastic songwriter, who came up with melodies that could withstand pretty much anything you might throw at them. But it’s not as simple as that. To Jennings’ immense credit the album’s core sound genuinely works. It’s muscular and potent in a glossily undeniable 80s AOR anthem way, its elements seamlessly melded: the lonesome whine of the pedal steel guitar fits neatly among the panoply of vintage synth noises, as does the fiddle, which is frequently required to play motifs that sound more Middle Eastern than country.
Moreover, Jennings genuinely reinterprets the songs he’s chosen. He strips the vocals on From Here to Eternity and I’m Left You’re Right She’s Gone of their vocodered artifice: he sings them dead straight, managing to get some emotion out of the former – not, by any stretch of the imagination, a lyric of such complexity and depth that anyone’s going to devote their life to unpicking it in the style of a Dylanologist – and pointing up the similarity between the latter and a classic country heartbreak ballad. His take on The Never Ending Story replaces Limahl’s featherweight voice with that of alt-country singer Brandi Carlile, who sounds infinitely more careworn: suddenly the song’s words sound wistful and strangely moving, rather than daft.
Curiously, the one collaboration that doesn’t work is Marilyn Manson’s version of Catpeople, because it doesn’t take the song any distance from its original incarnation. His voice sounds like a slightly gothier version of David Bowie’s, and the arrangement isn’t radically different to the original. It was doubtless fun to record, but it’s attended by a faint sense of pointlessness.
More often, though, Countach (For Giorgio) is attended by the pretty thrilling sense of a man shoving forcefully at the boundaries of the musical genre in which he works: whatever else he may be driving at here with the weird Athena poster artwork, the Lamborghini-referencing title, the snippets of dialogue and the stuff about virtual reality, Countach leaves the listener pretty clear about that.
You can hear it even on the most ostensibly straightforward track. Having unearthed an ersatz country number in Moroder’s back catalogue, Jennings gives the 1974 single Born to Die to Steve Young to sing, and arranges it in the way his father might have done: not a synthesiser or nod to Daft Punk in sight. But then, midway through, Jennings wrenches control and drives the whole track off-road: a wind tunnel of electronic effects leads to a burst of weirdly disembodied-sounding Nirvanaish angst. It’s both bizarre and bizarrely effective, a neat summary of Countach as a whole.
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