Album Review – Mack Geiger’s “Walk a Straight Line”

Neotraditional Country (#510.8) on the Country DDS.

A lot of country stars these days love to carry on about being from The South. Mack Geiger’s so damn Southern, it takes a 20-hour flight with a layover in Honolulu to get back home. That’s because this young man’s from where the roo and the wallaby roam, specifically Mount Larcom, in Central Queensland. He grew up listening to ’90s country and working on ranches—or as the Aussies call them, cattle stations. Now he’s ready to ply all that good country learnin’ to a career in music, and very well might be the next big thing in traditional country.

It feels like you can’t spit these days without hitting a new neotraditionalist. But that doesn’t make the songs of the meteorically-rising Mack Geiger any less impressive. He doesn’t just have the style and sound, but songs that yearn for something a little deeper to keep listeners around well after a catchy chorus. It was his string-laden slow ballad and sophomore single “String By” that unexpectedly blew up big time with listeners on both sides of the Pacific.

Now Mack’s getting in all kinds of country music trouble, signing with an American-based major record label, playing shows at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, Gruene Hall down in Texas, Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth, and the Grand Ole Opry on June 23rd. He might only have this six song EP to his name so far, but it’s taken him farther than some folks go a decade into the business. When you have good songs and a sound that hits right in the bullseye of what’s hot right now, the career of Mack Geiger is what can happen.

But sound is one thing. Feeling is another. He might be from Down Under, but there’s a lot of Texas in Mack Geiger’s approach, especially in the Western Swing-flavored song “Hole in the Wall.” The final song on the album “Mess of Blues” is the exact kind of emotional moment you want from a neotraditionalist, proving they’re unafraid to go deeper than the surface.

Walk a Straight Line is one heater after another, reminding you of the glory days of ’90s country, yet no song sounds the same, or is guilty of imitation, and every track feels alive and immediate. This isn’t an album it takes any time to warm up to. You’re automatically nodding along and saying, “This is my kind of country.” And luckily, Mack doesn’t come with one of those foreign accents that creates an impediment to putting you in touch with the passion and potency of the lyrics.

A little part of you does wish he would lean a bit more into his Australian heritage, if only because you always want to encourage entertainers to be authentic to themselves and not feel like they need to pander to what an American audience expects. Mack Geiger sounds like he could be from Birmingham or Raleigh, though not fair to accuse of doing a put-on either. If you grew up on ’90s country records, you could be from Singapore and sound like this.

On the next-to-last song “Campdraft Queen,” Geiger does mix in a bit more of the Aussie jargon as opposed to American words. Mack Geiger wrote the song by himself. In fact, he wrote all of the songs on Walk a Straight Line solo except one with a co-writer. To get this quality of songs from a single pen and a guy that can crow like this, it really speaks to the auspicious prospects of what Mack Geiger could become as long as the evil American country music machine doesn’t do its worst, which you always have to be wary of.

But let’s not be plotting this poor young man’s fall before he even gets a debut record out the door. And make no mistake, we’ll probably get a succession of EPs and singles to string us out for a while before they’re all compiled in a debut record with two new songs. But however it all unfolds, if you have any good taste in country, you’ll be jumping on the Mack Geiger bandwagon now if you aren’t already, and sit back and watching this young man from Oz help save country music.

8.5/10

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