★★★★★
Back in the late '80s Dwight Yoakam's no-nonsense Bakersfield sound felt, to many of us, like the only thing on the country radio station that hadn't been poured out of a spout at the end of some assembly line. Those were his essential years, when Yoakam seemed incapable of releasing a song that didn't burn up the charts, that didn't fill a void left there as drum machines and gloss overwhelmed the music. But, by the end of the '90s, it's fair to say, Yoakam began to fade away...
- www.popmatters.com
2013-12-11
★★★★★
Since Dwight Yoakam's authentic Bakersfield country and honky-tonk is by its very nature retro, his sound never goes out of style because it's never been in style. Therefore, retrospectives work nicely for him since the tracks are stylistically similar. Still, the twelve years covered, which pick up from 1999's similarly themed collection Last Chance for a Thousand Years: Greatest Hits from the 90?s, suggest that Yoakam hasn't written many tunes over the past 13 years...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2013-10-02
★★★★★
Inviting Beck to co-produce two tracks on Dwight Yoakam's first album of original material since 2005 (and his return to Warner Brothers after a sojourn at New West), might seem like a bold experiment to push his traditional Bakersfield sound in new and intriguing directions. But the results don't reveal anything radically different as Yoakam delivers another in a series of quality roots country releases...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2013-04-25
★★★★★
Yoakam's 1986 calling card Guitars Cadillacs Etc Etc was, on its release, regarded almost as a punk onslaught to the safe and sedentary sensibilities of a country music scene that had lost its bite. However, he wasn't doing anything especially radical, just reviving the hard-edged honky-tonk Bakersfield sound of a couple of decades earlier, reinvigorating the form to appeal to younger audiences...
- recordcollectormag.com
2013-04-02
★★★★★
Blessed with a tenor voice that is easily identifiable, Dwight Yoakam is at the point in his career where he didn't need to keep recording new material and could instead continue to record cool renditions of songs that inspired him throughout his life (albums like Dwight's Used Records and Dwight Sings Buck come to mind) but fortunately for us, 3 Pears isn't such an album...
- www.roughstock.com
2012-09-20
★★★★★
Spiritual heir to Gram Parsons, Yoakam was a similarly-transplanted southerner who fetched up in Los Angeles, riding the tip of the early-'80s new country swell. As honky tonk rocker, his sound was tougher than Parsons ("Guitars, Cadillacs", "Please, Please Baby") but equally as devastating when taking it slow ("I Sang Dixie")...
- www.uncut.co.uk
2010-06-19
★★★★★
Last Chance for a Thousand Years is a greatest hits collection which covers Dwight Yoakam's '90s catalogue. Oddly enough though, the songs are culled primarily from three albums, even though Yoakam has released a total of six albums during the '90s , seven if you include the import album Le Croix D'Amour. There isn't a single selection from Yoakam's last album, A Long Way Home, nor the album previous to that, Under the Covers. Doesn't that seem just a bit odd...
- www.nudeasthenews.com
2009-07-28
★★★★★
It was while promoting 2002's re-recorded orchestral anthology Travelogue that Joni Mitchell made her stroppy exit from the "corrupt cesspool" of the music biz. One of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century—as visionary as Dylan, as poetic as Cohen, as concise as Lennon —she quit, protesting her inability to continue in what she perceived as the dumbed-down epoch of Britney and Aguilera. "What would I do?" she sighed. "Show my tits? Grab my crotch? Get hair extensions and a choreographer...
- www.uncut.co.uk
2009-07-21
★★★★★
No text for this review; see http://robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-cg90/grades-90s.php.
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-17
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