But are we turned on?
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[6.86]
Brad Shoup: Bryan moves the party indoors, and he relocates the soundtrack from hip-hop to R&B. But his pipes aren’t going to do the trick on their own, and I can’t imagine that nagging piano figure will either. So I’m left to read a glumness, one man’s fantasy of a fantasy paying off.
[6]
Alfred Soto: The “old school beat” he reveres is ’90s R&B: Vandross and Babyface without the acoustics, oddly. The little bare feet by the cowboy boots recall courtly love nonsense that a singer with a voice not so gormless could make me believe. Still, the two-note piano counterpoint and guitar fills pour salt on this pudding.
[6]
Josh Love: Proponents of contemporary country often point to the genre’s abundance of detail (I’ve done it plenty of times myself), the way the best songs pile up everything from products to place names in constructing a reality that breathes. Like Ashley Monroe’s “The Blade,” however, Bryan proves how deadly effective a single seemingly benign image or two can be when delivered with care. Bryan doesn’t have to tell you exactly where he’ll park his pickup for a late-night romp in the truck bed, nor what song will be playing on the car stereo. Just a simple “feel my belt turn loose from these old blue jeans” and you’re putty.
[7]
Anthony Easton: Luke Bryan turns me on: his smooth baritone, his commitment to pleasure, his ability to write with simple metaphors, his refusal of complexity. The production of this is more slow-jam R&B than country, but not nearly as slow jam as Sam Hunt. It doesn’t matter though — the writerly details, the lines about belts and cowboy boots and T-shirts, the literal stripping in a figuratively stripped down-groove might be the sexiest thing I’ve heard him cover, and that includes a dozen masterpieces of erotic positioning.
[10]
Thomas Inskeep: I generally hate his uptempos, but there’s something about Luke Bryan’s ballads that sometimes just get me. (Like this.) Which I guess means I don’t wanna party with him, but I’ll let him seduce me. Because the man, frankly, knows how to seduce. This succeeds on every “let’s get back to the way we were” level, and is sexy-cum-romantic without the slightest bit of smarm. I’m surprised by just how much I like this.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: I am told Luke Bryan is the cutting edge of country’s sexual revolution, and that as a woman I am supposed to find him attractive almost by default, but single by single (and photo by photo), I am left cold. A list of turnoffs in “Strip It Down”: 1. The curdled-milk stiffness of Bryan’s voice, which no amount of Auto-Tune or melisma can make appealing. 2. The phrase “little bare feet,” possibly the unsexiest words committed to writing; it’s like he’s talking to a kindergartener or a Madame Alexander doll. 3. The metaphor-such-as-it-is, which flirts half-assedly with old-time country authenticity (“like a needle finds a groove,” “an old school beat,” “I wanna drop this cell phone now”) and ersatz storytelling (“we both know that we lost it somehow, let’s get it found”) before settling on “shut up and strip.” 4. Shattering a cell phone during the act. That’s one way for a hookup to cost $550, I suppose. 5. The way the verse and chorus abandon sultry for the Heroic Country Music Melody Showboating; if you’ve listened to even two tracks you know the kind. The worst thing is, the instrumental is quite nocturnal and wistful and nice — reminds me of Bird York’s “Up in Flames.” If only it were given to someone competent.
[5]
Crystal Leww: Can we be done pretending that “Bro Country” actually means anything in 2015?
[6]