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Kyle Park’s ‘Anywhere in Texas’
Kyle Park is upbeat. Breakups and other adversities don’t break his spirit. His mood, like his music, spirals up and up and up.
The Central Texan is good at evoking the concrete: The feel of a blanket on a cold night, the moonlight hung above a summer trail. (Actually, weather reports might appear a little too frequently in “Anywhere in Texas.”)
His big subject, however, is lovin’.
Young lovin’, married lovin’, cheating lovin’. Especially the physical manifestations of lovin’.
Park seduces with his confident, almost athletic sensuality in “Living Room Loving,” “Don’t Look,” “Day by Day,” “A Woman Like You,” “The Other Man” and “First Day of Summer.” Even in songs of lost or losing lovin’ — “Cold in Colorado,” “Baby I’m Gone,” “Tossin’ and Turnin’,” “Nightmare and a Dream,” “These Days” — he still beams with the promise of tomorrow’s romance underneath the sigh of melancholy.
The album’s title song is country’s umpteenth paean to our big state, written as rejection of Europe after a short musical tour. Even homesickness turns upbeat at Park’s hand. He ought to give foreigners another chance — your first out-of-country tour is going too be like “Survivor,” no matter who you are, and don’t order Jack and Coke overseas — because Park is authentic enough to avoid the commercialized Nashville trap, while writing songs catchy enough to saturate the airwaves.
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