As an art form, modern country music is bankrupt. How else to explain the plethora of country bands that look like boy bands, or Gone Country, CMT’s reality TV attempt to cast Dee Snider and Bobby Brown as country stars? The way of Willie and Waylon, Hank and Merle, is wandering, but it isn’t lost. Yet. We can thank Jim Waive for that. Waive and his band, The Young Divorcees, are writing country music the way it should be written: honest, gritty, pained. Waive covers all of the requisite country bases in his songwriting—love gone bad, heartache, revenge—and when he sings, you’ll believe him. Like you, he’s been there. That believabilty, that truthfulness, is the strength of Waive’s music. Strike a Match, the band’s second release, is a ten-song memoir to the glory years of outlaw country and a present day call to revisit what made country music—the original Americana—great. Waive and his Divorcees remind us that country music should be more about balls and less about big belt buckles.
—Dave Stallard
