★★★★★
Being a ramblin' man has been reduced to something of a cliché ever since Hank Williams expressed his ambivalent attitude about his own proclivities back in the '50s. But the feelings behind the concept are timeless as Chris Knight proves on his stirring sixth album. "I'm a homesick gypsy," he moans on the opening track and by the closing "Go on Home," twelve songs and a lifetime later, this grizzled road warrior seems ready to put down some roots...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2013-04-25
★★★★★
It's all too common for contemporary country singers to brag about their Southern roots. However, very few are as undeniably country as Chris Knight. He may throw in a little electric rock guitar here and there, but when that voice of his rings out, it's like melodic dialogue from the movie Deliverance. Little Victories is the true soundtrack to America's recession...
- www.roughstock.com
2012-10-08
★★★★★
In interviews and press releases, Chris Knight comes across as fairly ambivalent about 2007's The Trailer Tapes and surprised at its reception. Recorded in the lead-up to 1998's Chris Knight, The Trailer Tapes finds Knight holed up in his hot single-wide trailer, surrounded by farm sounds, recording the sound of just himself and his acoustic guitar...
- www.popmatters.com
2011-01-20
★★★★★
Chris Knight has recorded three albums in the shadow of his hero Steve Earle, with whom he shares a gravelly voice, a hard-charging roots-rock sound and a lefty's eye for irony. But while Knight is hella pissed, he isn't entirely at home in Earle's big-stroke rabble-rousing...
- www.blender.com
2010-08-22
★★★★★
From the ex-hellion drinking ice tea in his yard to the city laborer who'd rather work his job than wear chains like his cousin Willie, this is where the Kentucky storyteller gets off the outlaw romanticism train, which turned into a Trailways bus years ago. "Old Man" deserves to be programmed back to back with John Prine, "Dirt" with Freedy Johnston. Still, put him head to head with those guys on the wrong Saturday night and he might still be inclined to kick both their asses.
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-17
★★★★★
good old dirtbags raise hell as they go there ("A Pretty Good Guy," "If I Were You")
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
This being Nashville, of course they claim his secret is reality, but I say it's literature. He's a writer pure and simple, schooled in the economical everyday; if he'd grown up in California instead of Kentucky, he'd have tried his hand at sitcoms. I love the way he finds a pungent trope and tops it--drives his truck to Timbuktu and then lies down on a bed of nails. The music is spare enough to signify reality, and big enough to heighten it.
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
It's a lot easier to write the wild side than to live it, but not a lot smarter ("The Jealous Kind," "Carla Came Home").
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
A life full of music without much transcendence, a life touched by sin without much guilt ("Another Dollar," "Crooked Road").
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
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