Roger Harvey’s Cowtown packs a huge punch for a 3-song EP. The Philadelphia songwriter is best known in the storied indie rock and punk circles that the city boasts, but Cowtown brings Harvey to his roots. Not only that, it feels like the culmination of Harvey’s creative output.
Even listening to his 2015 album Twelve Houses, very much a product of its time, we hear a sense of twang and Harvey’s commitment to storytelling. Cowtown strips away the bells and whistles. The title track is a wry examination of the triumphs and travails of growing up in podunk — if country music were honest, this is what it would be. “Talkin’ Hard Line” leverages country music tropes to take to task the politics that have made the genre synonymous with conservatism. Closing out with a cover of Guy Clark’s “Come From the Heart,” Harvey and his collaborators envelop us in warmth and good, old-fashioned common sense — the real kind, no what the fascists will sell you.
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