But a classic crooner Pardi's not his irrepressible coltishness comes through even during the emotional numbers. The album also boasts several sturdy ballads, like "Love Her Like She's Leaving," with its chastened, too-little-too-late desperation, "Ain't Always the Cowboy," with its wistful admiration of female self-directness, and "Old Times," with its surrender to nostalgic fantasy. The next track, "Oughta Know That," offers another knowing take on acting out, with his ornery vocal syncopation tugging against a heavy four-on-the-floor groove. "Well, speaking of my friends and speaking of my drinkin.'" He lets the bluesy note ring for a beat before the drummer shouts a count-off and the band hurtles into a hard-rocking boogie. "Then she started in on my friends and my drinkin,'" he complains. But the storytelling is all the more colorful because of the way Pardi feigns glumness during the verses and gets rowdy at the chorus. "Tied One On" is another song whose corny-clever country wordplay spins yarns about bad, boozy behavior. During the 90-second outro vamp, the serrated guitar licks and bee-swarm fiddling reach breakneck speed. The album track "Me and Jack" has a runaway train beat, but also gets plenty of its bite from his boisterous, needling vocal attack. Pardi says he'd like to print a tongue-in-cheek, but apt descriptor for it - "turbo-tonk" - on a t-shirt. They favor muscled-up guitars and booming drums, but reserve a place of honor for gutsy, tunefully expressive fiddle and steel solos. Like his first two full-lengths, he produced this 14-song set with Bart Butler (they wrote quite a bit of it separately and together, too), only this time their longtime engineer Ryan Gore received co-producer credit. Thanks in part to that momentum, Pardi's third album, Heartache Medication, is an emboldened work, a distilling of his sound into a more potent form - one that draws both vitality and assurance from his anything-but-sterile relationship to his tradition's modern era. Both artists were central participants in a high-profile album pairing the '90s duo Brooks & Dunn with its descendents this year. He seemed like less of an outlier once Luke Combs began his own ascent a couple of years later, affably red-blooded and, like Pardi himself, fluent in the country of his youth. His breakthrough moment came in his fourth year of releasing music, 2015, when he topped the Country Airplay chart with "Head Over Boots," an uncluttered honky-tonk shuffle with crisp, contemporary production. Jon Pardi, a native Californian who's spent this decade building his career in Nashville, has willfully ignored that divide while attracting youthful crowds with his rascally, hyperactive brand of hard country.
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