Chris Knight, Enough Rope (* * * 1/2)
Chris Knight peoples Enough Rope with a small town’s worth of gritty characters trying to hang on to their love, their land and their pride. “There ain’t much of nothing left of this place where I became myself,” he sings in Rural Route. That sense of displacement pervades the album, from an old man’s resignation that the land he’s worked for a lifetime will be sold after he dies to a young man’s balled-up frustration and helplessness as he watches earth-movers tear apart his grandfather’s riverside farm to build a factory. Working in the best storytelling traditions of John Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen, Knight sings of “dreams that will come true and some that won’t” — and not only the dreams, but also the life that comes in between them. --- Brian Mansfield