*** Buddy Miller

POISON LOVE

(High Tone)

Buddy Miller's assertive guitar charges more toward rock here than on his intense debut, Your Love and Other Lies, but the overall mood is still in the retro-country vein. Cajun fiddling propels the rhumba-tinged title track, which is topped off with some snarling harmonies by Steve Earle, and Emmylou Harris lends her hillbilly whine to a track. Writing with his child-voiced wife, Julie Miller, as well as singer/songwriter Jim Lauderdale, Miller offers songs about life on the land, where farm folks are poisoned by insecticides and buried land mines litter the Third World. This is classic country music that veers away from country's contemporary links to conservative politics.

-- Bruce Sylvester