Al reps a new name in country…
Al Varela: Wyatt Flores is one of the most promising new names in new country music, and the fact that he can deliver bangers of this magnitude on merely his debut album shows incredible potential. The gallop of the drums and the fierce bassline are an exhilarating way to kick the song off. Wyatt Flores’ desperate pleas to keep his relationship together have the perfect amount of angst, determination, and fear to keep the song moving and the tension high. The way he snarls the song title amid raging guitar and fiddle solos lights up my brain.
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Aaron Bergstrom: He has consistently been marketed as The Sensitive One (his New York Times profile from earlier this year was titled “Wyatt Flores, a Rising Country Artist, Has a Superpower: Tapping Emotions“), and it’s possible that depth of feeling exists in his earlier work. But I’m not hearing much in “Don’t Wanna Say Goodnight” that would set it apart from all the other down-the-middle country-rock songs. The strings are nice.
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Isabel Cole: Nothing about this is unfamiliar, but the energy crackles, particularly at the end, and there’s a vulnerable warmth to Flores’s voice that keeps this from feeling by-the-book. I like the line about the ceiling fan: an observation about both the things you notice when you’re truly plastered, and the way your thoughts always wind back to a particular someone when you’re truly down bad.
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Tim de Reuse: Structurally, this tune is very much beholden to the 21st-century country zeitgeist, hammering on a single earworm chorus through swell and ebb and swell, but it sounds like a sleek CGI reboot of some of the most lush, sophisticated 90’s country acts I remember. Guitars that sound like physical objects! Violins that sound like a human is playing them! Drums that have a petite, thoughtful little snap instead of an overcompressed whoosh! Even the mention of “crazy green eyes” leads into such a clever turnabout that I can’t really groan at it as much as my sense of good taste is telling me to.
[8]
Katherine St. Asaph: “Don’t Wanna Say Goodnight” has the misfortune (well, good fortune in terms of market positioning, but misfortune for me) of coming out amid a resurgence of songs much like it. Nominally the song is country, but it has less of an affinity with country radio than your Benson Boones and Noah Kahans — and it wouldn’t be especially noteworthy in either setting. The drums at the beginning were building some energy until they didn’t; I guess they remembered what kind of song they were in.
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Jel Bugle: This is a super good country belter — completely unoriginal, but who cares? There is plenty of room for things that sound familiar and don’t overly burden the listener.
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Nortey Dowuona: “I don’t know. I wanted to create an album that, in some ways, made people proud of America again,” Flores said — better said than done, young’un. This does go, though. We appreciate Tyler Childers fans round these parts.
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Ian Mathers: I had to A/B this with some live versions to try and figure out whether they messed with/smoothed over the vocals here, especially on the verses. I’m still not sure, but it does sound better live. This version sometimes sounds a bit like Flores is singing through the blades of a rotary fan. Which is a shame, because this otherwise has a drive and a brio I wish we got more often in the country we cover here. Love that fiddle in particular.
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Taylor Alatorre: Some cool synchronization going on in the transition from second verse to chorus: a sudden halt and then build-up in musical intensity, as the narrator goes from falling asleep drunk on the couch to being woken up “like a sun in the morning,” roused by the fear of inaction leading to regret. Like the ceiling fan it uses as a symbol of rumination, the song is all steady rhythm and constant motion, clear in its purpose despite the occasional murmurs of doubt. I wish Flores wasn’t so single-minded as to stop short a guitar solo in the early stages of ripping, since it seemed poised to deliver a vivid portrait of hard-luck desperation let loose. Chasing after airplay is as much about hard choices as chasing after an ex, I guess.
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