Albums : Luke Bryan : Crash My Party
Albums : Luke Bryan : Crash My Party
Listen To Luke Bryan : Crash My Party
The most uncomfortable Luke Bryan sounds on “Crash My Party,” his fourth album, is at the beginning of the second song. It’s called “Beer in the Headlights,” and it’s about a familiar kind of romantic infatuation. Mr. Bryan begins the ode by sketching out a magical rural night: “Honeysuckle in the air/Breeze blowing through your hair.”
Boy, does he sound ill at ease painting this picture, the sort of scene that’s taught on the first day of Country Songs 101. Mr. Bryan is a country singer, yes, but he sounds like anything but. These words — these familiar tropes — are obstacles he’s tripping over, as if he were trying them out for the first time.
Mr. Bryan, as anodyne a singer as exists in the genre, has an unconvincing voice and not much attitude to sell it with. A few times on the competent but wearisome “Crash My Party” (Capitol Nashville), released this week, he sounds dutifully twangy, but those moments are exceptions.
And yet Mr. Bryan is the most prominent ascendant star in country music: he won entertainer of the year at this year’s Academy of Country Music Awards, the more lightly regarded of that genre’s two big annual ceremonies, but also the one more representative of shifting sands. This, though, says far less about him — there is perilously little to say about Mr. Bryan — than it does about the spectrum of country music, which has moved so far away from rural modes that its stars need no longer code their familiarity with them.
As an example of this, take Mr. Bryan’s other 2013 release, “Spring Break ... Here to Party,” largely a collection of songs from a series of spring break-themed EPs he’s been releasing since 2009, and which define him far more than any honeysuckle could.
This thematic shift mirrors country music’s full-fledged arrival as an urban and suburban phenomenon — in the college towns where young people from smaller towns congregate, or the cities that are home to large numbers who migrated from the South. These aren’t country fans who find themselves in opposition to much of the rest of what’s on the pop charts, but country fans who see themselves as firmly part of that world, who aren’t scared of hip-hop. (Mr. Bryan sprinkles in some references, catchphrases and the like.) Country music is more mobile, and more open-eared, than it’s ever been before.
So as country’s demographic base spreads out, the music must reach beyond its niche. That’s why baseball caps have replaced cowboy hats, why the outlaws aren’t as raucous as they once were, why Taylor Swift is the most important pop star of the last decade.
Mr. Bryan, studiously neutral, is a country star for these times. His preoccupations, in so much as he has any, are with the places where alcohol intersects with life’s adventures. In his world, there’s no seduction without a few sips of liquor, typically cheap stuff: “Gave me a kiss with Bacardi on her lips, and I was done.” Alcohol is also good for trying (but failing) to get over an ex (“I See You”) and coping with the loss of someone close (the catastrophically dim “Drink a Beer”).
When not near the bottom of a bottle, Mr. Bryan can be a convincing enough crooner. The title track is tender in the manner of 1980s power ballads: “I don’t mind telling all the guys I can’t meet ’em/Hell, we can all go raise some hell on any other night.” And “Roller Coaster” is unexpectedly lovely, a simple conceit about overwhelming passion rendered elegantly: “She’s like a song playing over and over/In my mind, where I still hold her.”
Mr. Bryan’s success has inevitably made way for a new legion of largely faceless gentlemen, many of whom make Mr. Bryan look like Waylon Jennings. There’s the dull and popular duo Florida Georgia Line, or the 21-but-looks-15 Hunter Hayes, threatening to be country music’s Justin Bieber. Last week, Brett Eldredge released his debut album, “Bring You Back” (Atlantic Nashville), a sometimes appealing, sometimes schlocky blend of after-hours sincerity and back-roads wistfulness. The movement’s paterfamilias is probably Blake Shelton, who is more blatantly country than any of those who came after him, but who cleans up well.
But almost all of these like-minded compatriots appear less fearful of being mistaken for a country artist of old than Mr. Bryan does. Only in a few places on his new album does he run that risk: the muscular “That’s My Kind of Night,” which has some hip-hop in its DNA, or the power country of “Out Like That,” which may as well be a Bon Jovi song.
Mr. Bryan buries his obligations to the genre as it once was on the final two songs on the album. “Shut It Down” is rote sexy country, about a man, his tractor and the woman urging him to get off it. “Dirt Road Diary” is typical rural nostalgia: “Me and Daddy’d ride around all day/Shooting doves off a line in a Chevrolet.” But here, too, Mr. Bryan sounds uncomfortable, as if he were reading entries scribbled by someone else.
Crash My Party Review
The third time may be the charm, but for Luke Bryan, the fourth is the monster. Crash My Party, studio album No. 4 from Luke, is geared to blast the Georgia boy into the rarified air of country’s superstars. All the imagery his fans have come to demand is there: tanned legs swinging over tailgates, starry Southern nights, red Georgia clay and an endless supply of cold cans.
Two songs, in fact, have “beer” in their titles, and both are intoxicating. “Beer in the Headlights” twists the mesmerized-deer idiom with some clever wordplay, and “Drink a Beer,” co-written by Chris Stapleton, poignantly memorializes a fallen friend. Other entries excel at nostalgia.
“We Run This Town” reflects on those days when being a teenager felt like being king of the world, or at least of your small town, while “Blood Brothers” is a one-for-all/all-for-one anthem. “Dirt Road Diary,” one of two songs Luke co-wrote, is a snapshot of his upbringing. It closes out Crash My Party and stands as the album’s high point.
Conversely, the weakest track is its opener, “That’s My Kind of Night,” a mishmash of hip-hop tropes (make it rain), country clichés (diamond-plate tailgate) and inane couplets that sound like something Guy Fieri would riff on in Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (Catch us up a little catfish dinner / Gonna sound like a winner). “Play It Again,” though likely a hit waiting to happen, also drops that same time-worn tailgate.
In the future, it’d be nice to see Luke, the reigning ACM Entertainer of the Year, grow out of the fields he’s so clearly comfortable in. But for now, if the soil is still bearing fruit, you can’t blame him for continuing to plow ahead.
Contact Luke Bryan
Website | MySpace | YouTube | Twitter | Facebook | Reverbnation | Camo Space
Contact New York Times
Website | Facebook | Facebook | YouTube | Google+ | Pinterest
Contact Country Weekly
Website | Facebook | Facebook | MySpace | Google+
Sources : Luke Bryan Photo | Listen To Crash My Party | Luke Bryan Article | Crash My Party Review
Purchase : iTunes | Amazon | Target | Walmart
Listen To Luke Bryan : Crash My Party
The most uncomfortable Luke Bryan sounds on “Crash My Party,” his fourth album, is at the beginning of the second song. It’s called “Beer in the Headlights,” and it’s about a familiar kind of romantic infatuation. Mr. Bryan begins the ode by sketching out a magical rural night: “Honeysuckle in the air/Breeze blowing through your hair.”
Boy, does he sound ill at ease painting this picture, the sort of scene that’s taught on the first day of Country Songs 101. Mr. Bryan is a country singer, yes, but he sounds like anything but. These words — these familiar tropes — are obstacles he’s tripping over, as if he were trying them out for the first time.
Mr. Bryan, as anodyne a singer as exists in the genre, has an unconvincing voice and not much attitude to sell it with. A few times on the competent but wearisome “Crash My Party” (Capitol Nashville), released this week, he sounds dutifully twangy, but those moments are exceptions.
And yet Mr. Bryan is the most prominent ascendant star in country music: he won entertainer of the year at this year’s Academy of Country Music Awards, the more lightly regarded of that genre’s two big annual ceremonies, but also the one more representative of shifting sands. This, though, says far less about him — there is perilously little to say about Mr. Bryan — than it does about the spectrum of country music, which has moved so far away from rural modes that its stars need no longer code their familiarity with them.
As an example of this, take Mr. Bryan’s other 2013 release, “Spring Break ... Here to Party,” largely a collection of songs from a series of spring break-themed EPs he’s been releasing since 2009, and which define him far more than any honeysuckle could.
This thematic shift mirrors country music’s full-fledged arrival as an urban and suburban phenomenon — in the college towns where young people from smaller towns congregate, or the cities that are home to large numbers who migrated from the South. These aren’t country fans who find themselves in opposition to much of the rest of what’s on the pop charts, but country fans who see themselves as firmly part of that world, who aren’t scared of hip-hop. (Mr. Bryan sprinkles in some references, catchphrases and the like.) Country music is more mobile, and more open-eared, than it’s ever been before.
So as country’s demographic base spreads out, the music must reach beyond its niche. That’s why baseball caps have replaced cowboy hats, why the outlaws aren’t as raucous as they once were, why Taylor Swift is the most important pop star of the last decade.
Mr. Bryan, studiously neutral, is a country star for these times. His preoccupations, in so much as he has any, are with the places where alcohol intersects with life’s adventures. In his world, there’s no seduction without a few sips of liquor, typically cheap stuff: “Gave me a kiss with Bacardi on her lips, and I was done.” Alcohol is also good for trying (but failing) to get over an ex (“I See You”) and coping with the loss of someone close (the catastrophically dim “Drink a Beer”).
When not near the bottom of a bottle, Mr. Bryan can be a convincing enough crooner. The title track is tender in the manner of 1980s power ballads: “I don’t mind telling all the guys I can’t meet ’em/Hell, we can all go raise some hell on any other night.” And “Roller Coaster” is unexpectedly lovely, a simple conceit about overwhelming passion rendered elegantly: “She’s like a song playing over and over/In my mind, where I still hold her.”
Mr. Bryan’s success has inevitably made way for a new legion of largely faceless gentlemen, many of whom make Mr. Bryan look like Waylon Jennings. There’s the dull and popular duo Florida Georgia Line, or the 21-but-looks-15 Hunter Hayes, threatening to be country music’s Justin Bieber. Last week, Brett Eldredge released his debut album, “Bring You Back” (Atlantic Nashville), a sometimes appealing, sometimes schlocky blend of after-hours sincerity and back-roads wistfulness. The movement’s paterfamilias is probably Blake Shelton, who is more blatantly country than any of those who came after him, but who cleans up well.
But almost all of these like-minded compatriots appear less fearful of being mistaken for a country artist of old than Mr. Bryan does. Only in a few places on his new album does he run that risk: the muscular “That’s My Kind of Night,” which has some hip-hop in its DNA, or the power country of “Out Like That,” which may as well be a Bon Jovi song.
Mr. Bryan buries his obligations to the genre as it once was on the final two songs on the album. “Shut It Down” is rote sexy country, about a man, his tractor and the woman urging him to get off it. “Dirt Road Diary” is typical rural nostalgia: “Me and Daddy’d ride around all day/Shooting doves off a line in a Chevrolet.” But here, too, Mr. Bryan sounds uncomfortable, as if he were reading entries scribbled by someone else.
Crash My Party Review
The third time may be the charm, but for Luke Bryan, the fourth is the monster. Crash My Party, studio album No. 4 from Luke, is geared to blast the Georgia boy into the rarified air of country’s superstars. All the imagery his fans have come to demand is there: tanned legs swinging over tailgates, starry Southern nights, red Georgia clay and an endless supply of cold cans.
Two songs, in fact, have “beer” in their titles, and both are intoxicating. “Beer in the Headlights” twists the mesmerized-deer idiom with some clever wordplay, and “Drink a Beer,” co-written by Chris Stapleton, poignantly memorializes a fallen friend. Other entries excel at nostalgia.
“We Run This Town” reflects on those days when being a teenager felt like being king of the world, or at least of your small town, while “Blood Brothers” is a one-for-all/all-for-one anthem. “Dirt Road Diary,” one of two songs Luke co-wrote, is a snapshot of his upbringing. It closes out Crash My Party and stands as the album’s high point.
Conversely, the weakest track is its opener, “That’s My Kind of Night,” a mishmash of hip-hop tropes (make it rain), country clichés (diamond-plate tailgate) and inane couplets that sound like something Guy Fieri would riff on in Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (Catch us up a little catfish dinner / Gonna sound like a winner). “Play It Again,” though likely a hit waiting to happen, also drops that same time-worn tailgate.
In the future, it’d be nice to see Luke, the reigning ACM Entertainer of the Year, grow out of the fields he’s so clearly comfortable in. But for now, if the soil is still bearing fruit, you can’t blame him for continuing to plow ahead.
Contact Luke Bryan
Website | MySpace | YouTube | Twitter | Facebook | Reverbnation | Camo Space
Contact New York Times
Website | Facebook | Facebook | YouTube | Google+ | Pinterest
Contact Country Weekly
Website | Facebook | Facebook | MySpace | Google+
Sources : Luke Bryan Photo | Listen To Crash My Party | Luke Bryan Article | Crash My Party Review
Purchase : iTunes | Amazon | Target | Walmart
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