Tubo Pastel | Turbo Pastel | Midwestern Records | October 2023
Country music has long struggled with identity. To combat the perverse gyrations of Elvis Presley, Music Row gussied up country’s twang and lavished the production with strings and choirs, a style which became known as the Nashville sound. With the softening of the 1970s, the genre mellowed out to reach suburban moms who were going doe-eyed for John Denver. The ’90s saw Garth Brooks infuse the heartache of George Jones with ballsy stadium rock sensibilities, and in the 2010s, the whitest people on the planet aped rap music to create the sickening, douchey permutation known as bro-country. Through it all, there have been retaliatory movements (Bakersfield sound, alt-country, bluegrass revival, Americana, etc.) that embraced country’s roots. The result is a binary system where left-field experimentation is rare, much less artistically viable. But with Turbo Pastel, there might be a glimmer of hope for where the genre could go in the 2020s.
In order to understand Ben Burwell’s latest musical project, it’s essential to note that he’s not cosplaying as a blue-collar guy. He’s a roughneck carpenter from Minneapolis, someone who could beat the shit out of shameless right-wing grifters like Jason Aldean. That Burwell comes from a working-class community is crucial to his songs feeling country because the sonic landscape makes great efforts to push the genre to its limits. With Turbo Pastel, he seeks to rectify the critiques many have with radio country, not by going back to the roots of the genre but by embracing the processed squeals of modernity. If pop-country is the sound of a soulless monolith attempting to recreate the spirit of rural America using AI, then Turbo Pastel is the auteur’s response to the artifice: radio country funneled through the lens of bedroom pop and the culture’s unending fetishization of the 1980s. It is mankind’s interpretation of what a robot country star would actually sound like, a Transformer replicating the sonic frequencies of Earth to his fellow Cybertronians. It should be an ungodly monstrosity: something Burwell cheekily addresses in the opening self-titled skit, where Burwell is set to record when he embraces the sounds of the album’s first proper song, freaking out his compatriots in the studio.
For many traditionalists, the opening salvo to “Delevan, WI” is indeed a disgusting Eldritch horror that they would run away from. The auto-tuned harmony of “Bout time they got hitched” wouldn’t be out of place next to the likes of “Cruise” or “You Proof.” Yet what follows is inspired: pure ‘80s euphoria, the tastiest of synth bleats drizzled with just a pinch of Telecaster twang. It vaguely calls to mind Bruce Springsteen’s acolytes, The Killers, and the lyrics hew even closer to the Boss’s signature style. This tale of youthful aspirations and unfulfilled fantasy might lack some of the depth or bite that Springsteen is known for, but the images are ones that land and resonate due to their familiarity.
Though the subsequent songs on the record continue to push country music toward a more online or urban sound (“Maureen” might be graciously described as “Sexual Healing” with a cowboy hat plastered atop it or, in Burwell’s words, “fiance country”), the throughline for much of the album centers around more traditional ideas of love, small-town life, and community. This doesn’t mean Burwell is a tepid lyricist, far from it. While Turbo Pastel might share the same bones as that of Shania Twain’s Come On Over, it’s far from a collection of simple ditties. “Babble On” is a critique of small-town hypocrisy with lines like “My old man will tell you just how it is / Some good old boys never know just when to quit,” showing that congeniality is nothing but a front (tastefully juxtaposed against a traditional honky tonk backdrop). “Bowerbird” poignantly lays out the nuances of separation and the toxicity of one partner not moving on, while “Rows” seeks to explore how one’s home can never live up the memories we developed in our upbringing.
Burwell is worth commending for his daring, but sometimes, his ideas fail to come to fruition. With its mix of Tom Petty strum work, Mutt Lange-inspired production, and Rush-like propulsion, “Presto” bursts like a firecracker. Yet, like most light displays, it ends far too soon. The abrupt ending is a minor quibble compared to the track’s lyrical focus, which feels loosely inspired by Barry Schwartz’s paradox of choice and how it drives people toward authoritarianism. It’s a bold topic to explore in song, but Burwell’s overly concise writing leads to a blunted message. While none of the album’s subsequent songs are quite this inarticulate, they often falter in their ability to tell complete stories. If most artists leave too much on the page, Ben Burwell is in the rare category of siphoning too much fat from his work. Perhaps it’s due to his background as a carpenter, where if you cut too much off a chair or table, you can’t just glue on an inch of wood to make the thing level. Whatever the reason, the polish on Turbo Pastel is impressive, though it only does so much to mask the shortcomings in Burwell’s songwriting. It’s like a coffee table you might get from a local furniture store. There’s little chance it’ll compare to the high end products from Ethan Allen, but it’s bound to have more detail and personality than anything at Lowes.
Note: This review was originally published in Rantipole.
Connor Shelton is a creative writer from St. Louis with reviews in Merry Go Round Magazine, The Line of Best Fit and Paste Magazine. Beyond writing about music, he also engages in live performance and one day hopes to convince Neal Morse to put on a production of Brother Andrew in St. Louis.
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