James McMurtry's written plenty of great songs, but he's never made a great album. His character sketches and stories have always rung true, and he's as perceptive a chronicler of the disaffected and alienated as you'll find, but his limited vocal range and sometimes almost-indifferent delivery have made even his best discs, Too Long in the Wasteland and Where'd You Hide the Body a struggle to get through. Live in Aught-Three isn't a great album, but the live setting lets McMurtry and his backing group, the Heartless Bastards, breathe real rock roll life into many of these songs for the first time. Levelland, an account of stasis in the fly-over land, aches with a longing for something, anything, that's more exciting than high-school football games and farms, and Red Dress burns with an angry intensity that you'd never have guessed McMurtry had in him. We also get a dose of McMurtry's deadpan humor on a few between-song asides ("I used to think I was an artist. Come to find out I'm a beer salesman") and a hilarious delineation between intellectuals and good ol' boys. In fact, the strongest material here -- and McMurtry's best work overall -- are the ones in which he finds both the humor and the pathos in quirky, nasty characters like the ticked-off heir to the worthless farmland of 60 Acres, or the twisted crew at a family reunion in Choctaw Bingo. If McMurtry's albums haven't caught your attention before, Live in Aught-Three is a perfect opportunity to reassess him. ~ Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, Rovi

1		Saint Mary Of The Woods
2		Fraulein O.
3		Red Dress
4		No More Buffalo
5		60 Acres
6		Rachel's Song
7		Out Here In The Middle
8		Choctaw Bingo
9		Lights Of Cheyenne
10		Levelland
11		Max's Theorem
12		I'm Not From Here
13		Too Long In The Wasteland
14		Rex's Blues