Album Review : Cliches as Long as a Country Mile for Marc Corey Lee

**, Marc Corey Lee, “Honky Tonk Crazy”, Mountain Records The problem isn’t that local country singer Marc Corey Lee does anything very wrong on his debut album. It’s that he doesn’t do anything that’s identifiably his own.

Lee wrote all nine songs here, but he might as well have found them while sifting through the trash outside a Nashville music-publishing house. The result is material that’s attractive, very well-performed and often invested with a bright spark of enthusiasm but that ultimately rings hollow. Lee never aspires to go beyond familiar formulas or to put some fresh zing into styles and song scenarios we’ve heard many times over.

With his pleasantly reedy tenor, Lee can replicate the wistfulness of an early Eagles ballad, and he and his band, Del Rio, have the chops and spunk to enliven a twangy rocking-country song such as the spirited “Cry, Cry, Cry”--not the Johnny Cash song with the same title.

The album’s pleasures--which include guest turns from accomplished L.A. session players Jay Dee Maness and Marty Rifkin on pedal steel guitars and Brantley Kearns on fiddle--are all on the surface.

Lee sings about loves that went wrong, about dreams of reconciliation and about the bar-life mating game. The characters are commonplace, and telling details and attention-grabbing twists find no place in verses full of stock images and cliches that trip easily off the tongue to the tune of catchy melodies.

Lee isn’t annoyingly slick, nor--except in “Maybe Someday”--is he prone to be treacly and precious. His stuff is just kind of there--as normal and unremarkable as his song titles, which also include “Back Where You Belong,” “Still Missing You” and “Don’t Know About You.” You can’t judge a song by its title, but in these cases the bland names don’t mask any surprises.

Lee’s attempt at social commentary, “Red Man Rising,” is a muddled, flat gesture full of haunting atmospherics and devoid of real Native Americans, living or dead.

Beholding the vast, mysterious western expanses, he imagines the ghosts of its long-gone inhabitants: “He can’t be forgotten, but the red man, the red man takes a fall.”

Actually, the Indians didn’t fall; they were pushed, and a songwriter interested in more than sentimental indulgence in the ghostly ambience of depopulated places would focus on the fact that they’re still here, still struggling with the consequences of having been pushed.

Also, a mind given to such sweeping (and outmoded) generalities as “the red man” isn’t thinking in the specific terms needed to make a song breathe with life.

Lee obviously has put a lot of effort into honing his strong performing skills; now he needs to put just as much into turning himself into a songwriter.

(Available from Mountain Records, P.O. Box 31040-469, Laguna Hills, CA 92652.)

Albums are rated on a scale of * (poor) to **** (excellent), with *** denoting a solid recommendation.