'ROPE' GOOD NOOSE FOR KNIGHT FANS
'Don't go looking for trouble," advises Chris Knight at the start of his new album. "It'll find you anyway."
True to his word, violence lurks around the corner in many of the singer's latest songs. We meet guys like one who's nursing 57 stitches in his head from a fight with the town psycho. Another character is the son of a dead con who fights against expectations that he'll lead an equally mean life. Then there's a drifting kid who thinks about hanging himself but discovers that he doesn't have the character to pull it off.

Knight sings these songs of threat in a voice well suited to them. His is a hard and gritty sound, full of pent-up anger, lurking hurt and an unflagging spirit.

He sounds like a scruffier John Mellencamp or a cousin to Steve Earle. Small wonder "Enough Rope" was produced by the latter's frequent collaborator, Ray Kennedy.

On this terrific fourth work by Knight, he fleshes out his trademark talent for murder ballads with his most nuanced storytelling to date, not to mention some of his hardest-rocking riffs.

Knight's sound can generally be placed in the alterna-country bin. But he turned up the amps this time.

It's a hot and coiled sound, ripe for biker bars and drinking dumps in any two-bit town. Knight even includes a salute to just such a joint: "River Road."

The singer extends his rural, working-class milieu with the song "Old Man," about a guy whose relations have all died or moved away from his disfavored part of the country. He's not unlike the guy in another song who complains that urban development has treated the land he grew up on like "Dirt."

Such tales could easily descend into sentimentality, but Knight never lets them. Even a song as potentially clichéd as an ode to an outlaw ("Bridle on a Bull") seems credible when delivered in Knight's tight snarl of a voice.

Unlike so many pseudomacho country stars, Knight's sound isn't just bluster. His fine storytelling, stalwart tunes and credible character mark him as the real thing. - Jim Farber