Pop Music Review : Collin Raye’s Private Reserve Won’t Fill You Up

When Collin Raye gets around do doing product endorsements, as every country singer worth his Morton Salt eventually does, he’d be the ideal pitchman for a nonalcoholic beer.

The ad would go something like this:

“Hi. I’m Collin Raye. I’ve sung in a lot of honky-tonks across this great land of ours, and I know there’s times when you’re out havin’ a good time and you need to take a break. You want a brew that tastes like the real thing but without anything in it that’ll set your head a-spinnin’. So grab a Faux Beer. It won’t let you get carried away.”

Raye is country music’s answer to Faux Beer. Where a George Jones or a John Anderson can leave you intoxicated with joy, inebriated with hurt, drunk with remorse, Raye keeps emotions soberly in check at all times.

Monday at the Crazy Horse, the first of four sold-out shows ending Tuesday at the club, Raye made his case for his level-headed approach. It’s served him well with radio programmers, record buyers and two-steppers: His latest album, “Extremes,” is nearing sales of 1 million copies and has spawned a string of hit singles, including his recent sing-along-ready “That’s My Story.”

But to extremes is precisely where Raye didn’t go during his hourlong set. Everything was contained within a narrow band, be it vocal expressiveness, musical shading or emotional resonance.

Raye was a genial host who played off his captain-of-the-football-team build and good looks, and, with a couple of Elvis 101 hip swivels, he even elicited a few squeals. Presley he’s not, but this Arkansas boy does exude a similar, Southern-bred gentlemanliness.

His lightly sandy tenor is modestly attractive, evoking a less intense Don Henley in the low end, a Michael Jackson-like plaintiveness in its upper range. With nary a trace of a twang, that voice, if not especially striking, does provide a contrast to most of his hit-making peers.

But Raye does very little sculpting with his. There were several vocal detours he might have taken to make the greeting-card sentiments of “If I Were You” jerk to life. Instead, he read through it as he did every other number, hewing close to the melody and dispatching the words with cool efficiency.

To add emphasis, he simply pumped up the volume. But loud is no substitute for exciting. The great country singers let the listener ride shotgun as the characters in their songs crash and burn because of their all-too-human failings. Raye’s characters just pull off to the side and get unseasonably warm.

*

Early on, his five-man band provided tastefully reined-in arrangements that didn’t try to oversell the limited charm of a song such as “Love, Me,” his first No. 1 hit, from 1991. As the show progressed, however, keyboardist Gene LeSage invoked his synthesizer’s faux string section more frequently, while guitarist Walter Garland cranked up the reverb for that Big Arena sound that earmarks Important Music.

The one real surprise of the evening came following “If I Were You,” Raye’s stab at an “I Swear”-type devotional to close the set.

As fans stood stamping and applauding in anticipation of the obligatory encore, Raye left them stamping and applauding. After several minutes, an announcer thanked the fans for coming, and that was that.

Turns out that Faux Beer has no lingering aftertaste either.