Electric Shaver

1	Thunderbird / Billy Joe Shaver 4:26
2	Try and Try Again / Billy Joe Shaver 4:47
3	Lately I've Been Leaning Towards the Blues / Billy Joe Shaver 3:28
4	New York City / Billy Joe Shaver 2:57
5	You Wouldn't Know Love (If You Fell in It) / Billy Joe Shaver 3:46
6	Slave at the Feet of the Queen / Billy Joe Shaver 2:56
7	People and Their Problems / Billy Joe Shaver 3:20
8	Manual Labor / Billy Joe Shaver 3:40
9	I'll Be Here / Billy Joe Shaver 3:58
10	Heart to Heart / Billy Joe Shaver 3:28
11	Way Down Texas Way / Billy Joe Shaver 2:53
12	She Can Dance / Billy Joe Shaver 3:19

Barnes & Noble

From the first snarling, rough-hewn notes of Eddy Shaver's electric guitar on "Thunderbird," the opening cut on the excellent new ELECTRIC SHAVER, you know you've wandered onto dangerous turf. Then Eddy's dad, the peerless songwriter Billy Joe Shaver, comes in moaning a bluesy lament, informing us "I'm livin' with a stranger now /The girl I knew got away somehow." Forcefully describing lost love, lost time, and a life that now seems empty, the elder Shaver hooks you into a narrative that doesn't falter over the next 11 cuts. Shaver, the group, mixes hard country, honky-tonk, and blues with effortless ease in shaping its own brand of alternative country, and Billy Joe comes up with one gem of a song after another. Each one takes a hard, uncompromising, unsentimental look at the winners and losers among us, and why they are the way they are. "Try and Try Again," "You Wouldn't Know Love," "People and Their Problems" -- these aren't songs, really, so much as profound treatises on love and friendship brought to vivid life by a bunch of tough-minded, no-b.s. musicians. This one's destined for the year-end best-of lists. And Billy Joe Shaver ought to be declared a national treasure. David McGee

All Music Guide

The title says it all. After several years of acoustic-based country, Billy Joe Shaver and his son Eddy have decided to up the ampage and deliver Electric Shaver. Theoretically, this is a good concept, but too much of the record sounds forced, as if blues-rock licks were grafted onto outlaw honky tonk backing tracks. Such grandstanding tends to obscure the songs, but then again, the rocking tracks on Electric Shaver aren't particularly strong, either. The opening pair of "Thunderbird" and "Try and Try Again" are cliché-ridden and awkward, two things Shaver has never been. However, things start looking up around the charming shuffle "New York City." From that point on (with an exception or two), things are laid-back and natural. The songs resonate and the performances are organic, not forced. As the Cajun-flavored "Manual Labor," the honky tonk ballad "I'll Be Here," the swinging "Way Down Texas Way," and Eddy's sweet midtempo country-pop tune "Heart to Heart" indicate, the Shavers are at their best when they let things flow, since the results are unself-consciously eclectic and quite charming. Stephen Thomas Erlewine