Spectreview: Orville Peck – Show Pony [EP]

-DEEP PINK-

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“Hard to think on your feet
Tired of beggin’ ’em just to compete
Shoot to win can feel so bittersweet
But you take what you can get”

For a entire genre about realities – hard, dirty, cruel realities – country music has long survived as a faceless, turgid fantasy of demographical pandering. Most of its biggest acts (largely male, to an almost cartoonish degree) deal in suggestive marketing, writing yarns not about what is but about what should be: the listening equivalent of masturbation. Done right, country can paint, captivate, provide catharsis, lend hope. For the last decade it’s mostly notable for its exclusivity, and for being a reassurance about how straight you are.

Orville Peck made a splash upon his Sub Pop debut Pony in 2019, though it had less to do with his music and more with his counterbalancing intentions: providing queerness, nuance and integrity to a style of music left fallow of those traits. Pony itself was a solid work, but it was less explicitly country and more a mid-tempo alt-rock record with shoegaze leanings that happened to be steeped heavily in magic-hour sunlight. Peck’s charisma, his mysterious identity, and the fringed masks he refused to remove in public, took up the slack and amplified the argument implied in his songs: namely, that country is actually just theater, with characters in caricatural roles that end up reflecting the human condition.

Show Pony, Peck’s first collection of songs after Pony’s moderate success, finds Peck participating in that theater ever more readily, to mostly successful results. It’s not that his songs have changed much, although there seems to be a subtle shift away from Pony’s dark venues and into the dusty outdoors. Save for its opening track – the soft-lit, yearning “Summertime” – those shoegazey textures from his debut are gone, replaced instead with compressed drums, centered piano, drier vocals and a fuller overall sound. In fact, it’s that heightened sense of production that shifts the sliders rightward; this EP feels more like a country record because of its studio upgrade. Your enjoyment of it will partly come down to how much you appreciate this new sheen (or if you’ll miss Pony’s comparatively mid-fi feel), but rest assured that Peck’s songwriting is still strong as ever.

Show Pony works best as a straight-laced showcase of the country tropes that Peck knowingly subverts in his work, almost as if Peck were putting on a songwriting clinic. The majority of its six tracks move like ballads, and occasionally they’re more than a little cheesy. The arrangements are airtight though, from the dusty solo guitar of “No Glory in the West” to the us-against-the-world credo of “Kids” to the potential radio hit of his duo with, yes, Shania Twain. That duo alone is wish fulfillment for any little gay boy having grown up with country music, and it’s exciting to see the results of the attention bestowed upon Peck over the last two years.

The downside to this is that Peck feels less like a winking outsider and more like another participant in the industry machine. That’s perhaps an unfair statement given the autonomy any artist has over the advancement of their career, but given the EP’s studio spit-shine and Peck’s widening of focus in his storytelling, Show Pony may be disappointing for those who appreciated Peck as a scrappy underdog and a queer thorn in country’s staid side. For those people, that side of him does still exist though, in the tender trucker fantasy of “Drive Me, Crazy,” and his brilliant gender-bending cover of Reba McEntire’s “Fancy.”

As an EP then, Show Pony might not be a substantial expansion of Peck’s world, but it does feel like a necessary outlet for an artist preoccupied with walking through as many newly-opened doors as possible. Optimistically, it foreshadows both a formidable star in the country world and a necessary rebalancing of the genre’s narrow scope. One can only hope that, dissimilarly to its cover art, Peck doesn’t become another toned-down caricature in the process.

Recommended for an electric touch.