Collin Herring

Collin Herring

Collin Herring has finally met his production match. While the Austin-via-Fort Worth songwriter's previous three efforts have been solid, serving up electric-honed alt.country in the vein of Son Volt, Ocho finds its intensity through subtlety. In large part due to Will Johnson's production, whose own work echoes throughout the album, Herring's songs are here given an appropriately arranged weight to the often dire bent of his sentiment. "Nothing's wrong, and nothing's good," Herring sighs in a trembling tenor on opener "Nothing's Good," and that tortured ambivalence laces the album throughout, much like Vic Chesnutt's complex balance of yearning and spite. "Seemed to Be" powers behind the intimidating percussion of the Monahans' Roberto Sanchez, but it's the weary crawl of "Trazodone" and closer "Little Aches" that best captures Herring's conflicted pull. The barrage of jump cut phrases sliding through "Kill the Cover" and the delicate pall of "Young Ones" pillar the edges of Ocho's sound, though the attempted melding of the two in "Hit Miss" is less effective, and the rock unraveling of "Passed Away" takes a step backward in the wake of its brittle distortion-fed rancor. For all the album's heft of desperation, it achieves a genuine catharsis, if only for a tenuous moment.