Album Review: Eric Church – Mr Misunderstood

Love his music or hate it – and, based off of a quick perusal of social media there appear to be many people on both sides of the argument – you have to admire Eric Church. He does things his way, and appears beholden to no one. That includes his record company, who apparently had no idea that Church was releasing a new album, the fifth studio effort of his career.

With absolutely no fanfare or advance knowledge, Church’s new album landed on the doorsteps and in the inboxes of Church Choir, the wonderfully-named Eric Church fan club, in the days leading up to last week’s Country Music Association Awards. No one else knew about it, and social media was incredibly quiet. Not so much as a solitary tweet from Church’s people, or the record company. It was just…there. I guess when you’ve sold as many albums and concert tickets as Eric Church has, you can do things like this, and not be completely reamed out by your label.

Church opened the CMA Awards with Hank Williams Jr. and came back later in the show to sing the title track from the new release, and only then did his Facebook and Twitter pages start letting us know that the album was out, and available for purchase on iTunes and elsewhere. Unorthodox, but interesting. I suppose we were due a follow up to 2013’s excellent The Outsiders, but I expected there’d be a stack of publicity ahead of it’s release.

Perhaps Church realises that the best publicity for his music is the music, and the ten tracks on Mr Misunderstood are fantastic. They were all written during the recent summer, and are produced by veteran Jay Joyce, who performed the same duties on The Outsiders. If that last release leaned away from traditional country and towards progressive rock and heavy metal, then Mr Misunderstood is more heartland rock. There’s less darkness than on The Outsiders, more levity, and more room for Church’s gravelly North Carolina drawl to shine.

The title track is my favourite. It’s the tale of an outsider who prefers classic rock to the top 40 stuff his friends are listening to, and may well be a little autobiographical for Church. It starts slowly and builds to a fantastic crescendo, featuring a chorus that’ll get stuck in your head and stay there.

“Mistress Named Music” is another high point of an album that, admittedly, doesn’t have many low ones. Church appears to have hit a real purple patch as far as song-writing goes, and his ability to write sombre songs where it’s more about the lyrics and his voice than the musical backing as interesting as his heavier stuff. The darker “Chattanooga Lucy” sees Church let his falsetto out to play, and it works. It works really well.

Whilst the title track might be about an outsider – at least in a musical sense – there’s little to not understand about Church’s incredibly-welcome new release. There’s no misunderstanding. The album is brilliant, and he’s raised the bar once more.