Album Review – Tony Logue’s “Dark Horse”

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#560 (Country rock) on the Country DDS.

Tough as nails and uncompromising, Tony Logue is a blue collar hero of modern country rock. He’s back with 12 new songs for you to pump your fist to, bundled under the appropriate title Dark Horse.

Tony Logue and his band The 184 have the uncanny ability to cut through all the pretentiousness that seems to permeate most all contemporary music to serve real and raw human emotions free from embellishment. Some need the cream, sugar, and cute flavors to choke down the bitterness. Tony Logue is coffee served black, and strong.

Logue’s not taking a damn thing put in front of him unless it’s earned. Faced with a fork in a the road, Tony Logue will take the harder path for the fortitude and honesty it will inspire in him, and just so nobody ever mistakes that he’s anything but his own self-made man.

When Tony Logue is told “no” by the music industry or anyone else, he isn’t discouraged. He licks his chops, and uses it as fuel. There’s no bellyaching here about not getting his due. Tony Logue is making his own opportunities, and doing it his way, while inspiring the rest of us hard-headed, uncompromising, and principled people to soldier forward as well, forgoing pragmatism to go after the ideal we know deep in our hearts is right.

Dark Horse is one blue collar and hard-nosed song after another, served up with Tony’s unvarnished and authentic drawl. He doesn’t sing, he punches. This music isn’t pretty, it’s powerful. Even when the music turns uncharacteristically soft in the song “So Help Me God,” it’s to contrast with the most desperate and swearing sentiments on the entire album. Multiple songs about the love he feels for his woman aren’t as much love songs as they are odes of loyalty and trustworthiness.


Many of Dark Horse‘s songs are from the road, and of the road. Tony Logue is a songwriter, but he’s not really interested in poetic eloquence. And to be honest, he may not be blessed with this gift even if he wanted to be. His words come out in the grind and hustle, with no mincing or mealy-mouthed delivery to the sentiments. But that doesn’t mean that his writing isn’t creative.

A perfect example is the song “Yellow Rose” about a stripper working to provide for her family, and her anxiety-filled husband. This is the kind of real-world storytelling that separates Tony Logue from the herd of country cosplay and rehashed ideas. Similar to Chris Knight, it’s the plainspoken, unpretentious nature undergirding everyday wisdom that makes these songs so compelling.

A fair criticism of Dark Horse would be how the songs might start to blend together towards the end of the album. But that’s when Tony Logue springs the song “Hammer” on you—a straight up country track complete with twangy steel guitar. It’s like a bar room singalong about putting your head down, and bringing about you dreams through hard work—one of the underlying themes of Dark Horse.

Will Tony Logue be one of the next hardscrabble musicians to emerge out of Kentucky to set the country music world on fire? Unfortunately, this business is too mercurial and lacking in meritorious incentives to make such a prediction. But as he proves on Dark Horse, Tony Logue has the stuff and the fortitude to be a front runner.

1 3/4 Guns Up (8.1/10)

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