Bucket

iTunes Review

Relocating from Texas to Nashville, country rocker Mando Saenz hooked up with songwriters Kim Richey, Will Kimbrough and producer R.S. Field to help expand beyond the Texas-base of his debut album Watertown. His characters still float from bars with their last few bucks saved for last call (“Seven Dollars”) and search for enduring love all the while denying it (“A Touch is All”), but 2008’s Bucket, his second album, shows greater maturation. Saenz’s hooks are sharper, his singing more confident, his arrangements more sweeping and grand. The drama of “Pittsburgh,” as the organ cascades past the brooding bass and the slow, pulsing chords, builds to a crescendo where Saenz delivers his lines with a casual harmonized whine that’s tailor-made for the situation. Saenz plays by all the usual alt.country rules. Lap steel, mandolin, electric guitars and keyboards slide in and out of the mix while Saenz’s people linger in the eventual doom of the night. The clichés occasionally threaten to bury him; on paper, he’s a standard read. But Saenz is too good a singer to settle for such a fate, as the tickle in his voice for “In the Back Of Your Mind” bears out.