Recommended for Airplay

Album Review

Following his 1997 live album, David Allan Coe releases a new studio album on Sony Music's Lucky Dog imprint, Recommended for Airplay, and not much has changed since the '70s and '80s, when he was putting albums out on sister label Columbia. The songs, all written by Coe, are still full of references to drinking ("Drink Canada Dry"), riding motorcycles ("A Harley Someday") and having trouble maintaining romantic relationships ("Drink My Wife Away," "She's Already Gone"). Coe's throaty baritone is more effective, if anything, and the music still veers between honky tonk country and blues-rock. Alternately humorous, sentimental and belligerent, the 59-year-old outlaw continues to pursue his own peculiar muse even if, despite the hopeful album title, he is unlikely to get the kind of notice he did 20 years earlier.