It’s Lady A Television! Your one stop shop for Lady Antebellum videos and also some reruns of Dawson’s Creek!…
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Alfred Soto: Inspiration and lightness of being all but dissipated since the deserved smash “Need You Now,” the boys and girl return with a slinky, sly number about city kids who work among “storefront mannequins sleepin’ in lights” but sneak into clubs cuz they know the band and — guess what — grow up to be Grammy winners. Whether by Petula Clark or Lloyd Cole, no song named “Downtown” has ever failed. Backed by aggressive guitar picking and those dusky male harmonies, this one is their best in years. Miranda Lambert apparently had first dibs, but in Lady A’s hands the marriage of material and persona deserved a triumphant ending.
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Edward Okulicz: A song about not going out anymore that sounds like a good song to jump in a taxi to on the way to a gig and then dies three minutes later is clever, and “Downtown” is meticulous and catchy. Hillary Scott’s curt delivery is more eye-rolling than the venom-spitting Miranda Lambert might have given it, but it sits well on top of the good-time guitars. It’s a surprise that she can do snappish so well, given the overly-honeyed (as in sweet but antiseptic) singles since “Need You Now.”
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Anthony Easton: I can’t help but view this as being delightfully meta. After a couple of years hearing (mostly young) men trying to convince (mostly young) women about the importance of the 40, the back fields, the woods, the sticks, and other generic markers of semi-rural spaces as markers of sexual autonomy, the gorgeous harmonies of Lady Antebellum note the vitality of the flâneur — or more importantly, the flâneuse. That it’s a flâneuse who encourages pleasure, and that the pleasures of the city, the walking, the lights, the smoking and even the mannequins in the shop windows might lead to less obtuse pleasures (and that the avoidance of cities might suggest an avoidance of these pleasures) provides a stark rejoinder to the homosocial tensions that have dominated Nashville, where even songs about fucking in the woods seem to be wryly intended for a public audience. The intimacy of the secret place remade for public consumption is reversed, where the lack of intimacy of public spaces is now remade for private consumption. Extra point for the last line of the song, with its flirtatious wink.
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Brad Shoup: Smoking and jaywalking. Wow, you guys. Great guitar structure worn down from too many takes or too little consideration. The chorus allows the tongue to flap along, but if I catch a karaoke host contributing dang one, I’m shutting it down.
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Scott Mildenhall: “We used to smoke while we were jaywalking; like it was your birthday every other Saturday night.” They should come to the UK. Jaywalking is legal here, so they can do it as much as they want. It might be a bit less exciting, but then quite a lot of things seem less exciting in the UK than in the US.
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Katherine St Asaph: They’re so chirpy when they’re mad, unnervingly so; this is practically a visitors’ bureau jingle for Main Street, USA, circa the idyllic ’50s, written by Leslie Knope. “I just don’t get it” is delivered with all the malaise of The Muppets; the song preceding it so relentlessly chaste I’m convinced he’s smoking candy cigarettes, she’s showing a little ankle, and they’re jaywalking through a cordoned-off street fair of lemonade stands. Which makes it rather alarming when you wonder if the chorus was meant as a double entendre.
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: It took me until the second verse of “Downtown” to realise quite how deft Hilary Scott’s vocal performance is. She describes getting ready to go out on the town before delivering an ultimatum to a disconnected lover: get over here or “you ain’t getting uh-uh”. It’s a well-delivered joke but one with a sadder undercurrent to it, Scott’s character being all dressed up with nowhere to go AND going nowhere romantically. She sings about a dead-end relationship with a glint in her eye, turning “Downtown” from pleasant Nashville-pop to a bout of sunny-key emotional overcompensation. “I just don’t get it,” she shrugs in the closing seconds, trying to hide a real emotional problem behind a rolling of the eyes (and almost getting away with it, the buoyancy of the song’s rhythms working overtime). Still: I’m actually hoping he calls and takes her out right now, the figurative jerk.
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