Returning home is an anxiety-inducing occasion if you’re from somewhere smaller than Austin, Texas. For Dylan Gossett, the home comforts and folk writing style blur together on Ramblin’, his second studio album. He sounds relieved to be off the road yet itching to get back on it. There’s a desire to always be moving at play here and it spreads across this country album. Modern country has fallen to caricature-like expressions, where you can guarantee a pickup truck and seedy bar somewhere in the middle of the album. But Ramblin’ takes a different route, and thankfully so. Gossett searches for reasons to stay home, whether it’s a love or lingering sense of fulfilment over what he’s accomplished so far. But no reason will ever be enough to remain, there’s no sense to standing still, as Gossett finds across this charmed second album. He’s managed to crack through the country slump with a disarming sincerity blurred with that pop vocal honesty.
Instrumentally it has more in common with the insincerity of Mumford and Sons but that lyrical consistency keeps Ramblin’ alive. At least, it does for the opening song, Loving You Like That. It drifts into simple sentimentality but there’s a few moments of note to come from that doubtful first half, where Gossett figures being off the road and back in his hometown isn’t all that bad. But by Clothesline it’s clear he’s itching for a way out, and the rest of the album forms a meditation on why we seek new experiences away from our hometown. For some, it’s as simple as there being nothing here beyond a viewing tower that looks like a Gilette razor and a pub that’ll issue you the worst food poisoning of your life. For others, it’s the satisfaction that comes from being on the road. Love and Such is a neat understanding of the push and pull that comes in leaving. Ramblin’ isn’t a single-minded album, but its premise is built around the urge to keep moving, no matter the consequence of doing so.
Much of the nuance found on Ramblin’ is obscured by a similar-sounding instrumental tone. It’s all the usual uplifting, spirited country hopes with a banjo pulling it all together. Gossett is at once appreciating the form that influenced him but identifying nothing new with its use. Ramblin’ suffers from an incredibly tepid instrumental scope, and by fifth song The Old Me, it becomes a chore to listen to. Gossett has a few standout moments as a lyricist but they, too, blur together. Stripped-back soppiness on the title track is the sort of song that’ll fill a stadium but not your heart. Broad enough to work for everybody, stripped of the specifics that Gossett no doubt pulled from to piece together the softer, acoustic sounds of his title track. Honeysuckle may be the most egregious cosplaying of country, yet it still features a neat and agreeable message. The hopes of leaving your hometown slip on Head in the Clouds, with Gossett suggesting he’ll stay where he is.
But to stay where you are implies a comfort with who you are, not just where you’re at. There’s a lack of instrumental growth that makes Gossett sound like a creature of habit, rather than one of creativity. A few blows of harmonica on Head in the Clouds is a nice touch, and it just works in the mix, that tickling of the brain when you know something sounds right, is at play. But the rest of Ramblin’ struggles to make much honest sense of its perspective. Broad but reminiscent, Gossett has his moments on Ramblin’ but never makes an all that interesting pivot either way. He sits on the fence despite taking action, and it comes together like that on Snow Melt. You can have it both ways; you can miss your hometown and long to leave it, but you have to choose some point. Gossett has the chance to here, but doesn’t take it.
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