The hubbub greeting Chris Knight’s 1998 debut revolved around the album’s gritty, pulp-country point of view, a tone set by scenes rife with guns, tough luck and beat-up pickups- and by the weight of the world etched into Knight’s ash-can rasp.

The Kentucky native’s new album, the wryly titled A Pretty Good Guy, continues his penchant for dramatic, back-holler noir, once again filling an album with odes to empty bottles, broken drams and hungry hearts.
Yet what separates Knight from all the Bruce Springsteen and Steve Earle wannabes isn’t his hard-boiled exterior, but what lies beneath: the empathy and understanding - the sheer depth- he betrays every time he delves into that forbidding, often unforgiving, world.

Take “Down the River”, a fiddle-haunted tale of bloodlust and biblical reckoning in which Knight refuses to cast judgment on his protagonist, instead crawling inside the guy’s skin to illustrate how revenge and violence feed upon themselves devouring our humanity in the process.

The Earle-inspired “If I Were You” settles another score. Playing a homeless panhandler who pulls a gun on a would-be benefactor, Knight confronts how injustice breed desperation. Elsewhere, the roiling guitars and thwacked backbeats often evoke John Mellencamp’s heartland anthems, as in the new “Oil Patch Town”, which throbs with the ache of feeling stuck somewhere without seeing a way out.
The uncluttered roots-rock arrangements on A Pretty Good Guy are more muted and brooding than on Knight’s debut, and more attuned to his lyrics. Credit goes to producer and former Georgia Satellite Dan Baird, whose rock-solid rhythms; hide’n’seek guitars and down-home stringed instruments give the songs muscle without getting in the way of the stories. Knight’s painterly images and careworn croak do the rest.