In Brief

* * * Marty Brown, “High and Dry,” MCA. Holy KawLiga--honky-tonk lives! This debut album sizzles with such purity, and authenticity, of emotion--from unbridled joy to utter despair--that most of Brown’s neo-traditionalist peers sound coldly calculating by comparison. Ignore two cliched ballads on which he drops his eerily Hank-esque wail to sound more “contemporary”--elsewhere Brown proves that a great country singer is, above all, a great blues singer.

New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).