“It’s time to make a change,” Robbie Fulks declares at the start of his latest record “Now Then”. The album opener “Workin’ No More Blues” quietly resists a world that demands greater conformity by the day.
Fulks’ trademark is a manipulation of language: by rearranging the meanings of simple phrases, cracking a whiplash of wordplay, and carefully arranging rhymes within rhymes. No one can turn a phrase or idea so economically. He loves words too much to waste them.
Fulks loves Country (especially its past) even as he despises what it has become. And making enemies of the humor-impaired is not a particular concern of his. In his own smartass, casual way, Fulks makes a serious, trenchant point about Country’s mindless idealization of common people. Simple isn’t inherently better than complicated, rural isn’t inherently better than urban, and the uneducated don’t intuitively have more wisdom than folks with Ivy League degrees. Common people can be kind, big-hearted, and deceptively savvy, but they can also be mean, prejudiced, and petty.
“I heard one song and was immediately a fan for life. ‘She Took A Lot Of Pills And Died’ embodies everything that makes Fulks great. It’s gleefully irreverent without being cruel, literate without being pretentious, laugh-out-loud funny, and catchy as hell. Fulks was able to capture the essence of so many show-business tragedies in eight brutally unsentimental, ruthlessly efficient words. Pithiness remains one of Fulks’ superpowers. His hate-hate relationship with the Nashville/Country-music establishment can be summed up in the title of a standout track on his second album: ‘Fuck This Town’.” – A.V. Club