Tomorrowland

One might expect that winning a GRAMMY™ and an Oscar (for his song \"The Weary Kind\" from the film *Crazy Heart*, cowritten with producer T-Bone Burnett) would catapult Ryan Bingham into a bigger spotlight. But working in a folk-country milieu isn\'t an easy thing to do, and getting pegged as \"folk\" or \"country\" tends to put one in a pretty tight corner. It\'s a shame, because fans of everyone from Wilco to Ryan Adams or even Band of Horses might appreciate Bingham\'s evolving music. On his fourth album, Bingham cranks up the volume—along with a fairly prominent streak of passion, or anger, or frustration. Something\'s lit a fire here! He comes across as the leader of a rough-and-tumble bar band, someone who\'s crawled across the desert, thirsty and hungry with an ax to grind. \"Guess Who\'s Knocking\" surges and thumps like a White Stripes tune, and Bingham\'s ravaged voice sounds like Paul Westerberg on the Springsteen-ish epic \"Rising of the Ghetto.\" Some listeners here might miss Bingham\'s folkier side, but surely a new crowd of restless souls with rock \'n\' roll in their blood will embrace the raucous *Tomorrowland*.

Ryan Bingham tells the economically busted, morally bankrupt world to go fuck itself