Vue Weekly

There’s nearly a minute of sorrowful pedal steel guitar crying out at the beginning of “Empty Saddle,” the opener on Cameron Latimer’s debut, before Latimer’s smooth voice glides into range. There’s no rush to get to the chorus here, and that attitude serves the music well as Latimer sings songs of broken hearts and broken minds, bad times and worse times and surviving them all. This is country music in the vein of the 1970s, when a little polish could blur the scratches but not make them disappear. And, really, it’s the scratches that make this an interesting record, whether Latimer is singing the tale of a man fighting to keep his ranch or trying to get over a love that’s been lost.

V