Everybody dies famous in a break up in a small town throwdown?
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[4.57]
Alfred Soto: During a 2014 interval Brantley Gilbert’s husky sincerity inched toward pathos. Now he plays against the wind machines of his mind, and Lindsay Ell hangs on to the drum loop by her fingernails.
[4]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: On one hand, Lindsay Ell’s truncated verse sells the urgency of her “But this is where I belong, this is my home too” line. On the other, she absolutely deserves to have more runtime without Brantley Gilbert’s gravelly voice getting in the way. I think this has a very good idea at its core — how living in a small town can make virtually everything remind you of an ex — but the song exhausts everything it has going for it by the halfway mark.
[5]
Thomas Inskeep: I really like the contrast of Gilbert’s edge-of-straining voice with Ell’s sweet-but-tough one, while the song itself essentially turns Sam Hunt’s “Break Up in a Small Town” into a male/female duet, which I’m good with. The guitars sound like a better Jason Aldean song. I’d be down for a duet album from these two.
[6]
Katie Gill: There was this godawful Jake Owen song last year where he tried to paint himself as still being small town honkeytonk despite the fact that he was born in a pretty populous Florida city, playing golf in the Nashville Golf Open and regularly wakeboarding. It’s a disgusting bit of blatant pandering in a genre full of attempts by millionaires to seem down to earth despite not having set foot in a town with a population under 6,000 people in decades. Thankfully, Brantley Gilbert and Lindsay Ell aren’t as disgustingly pandering as Owen was. But it does make you roll your eyes that these two are plaintively singing about navigating a break-up experience in a small town when one of them grew up in Calgary and the other has a net worth of around 15 million.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: How clever: a “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” flip. This songwriting final exam gets an A! Except it’s yet another song of tiresome small-town jingoism — as a city dweller, I can confirm that as one of them there are still intersections I dread, rooms whose new occupants I wonder about, former haunts I hate going to anymore, and that indeed, not even being a Yankee means your life will fling you through infinite, totally stochastic neighborhoods and friend groups, leaving nary a bad memory. It’s also a complete waste of Lindsay Ell. So maybe it gets more like a C minus.
[4]
Will Adams: They’ve got the riff from Journey’s “Faithfully” and nowhere to go, so why not settle in Generic Smalltown? Apparently it’s a provincial town, which is why verses are not welcome and the bulk of the song is a driving chorus that crowds everything else out and turns it into indistinct mush.
[3]
Alex Clifton: I’ve never been from a small town myself, but I live in Louisville these days. It’s a decently sized city but it has a lot of small town characteristics; I’ve heard stories from my friends about bumping into exes at Kroger, or making friends with someone at work only to realize you both had the same mutual friend circle back in college when you were two very different people. I never thought I’d be “local enough” here, but having lived in Louisville for almost ten years now I’ve experienced my own small-town moments: haunted buildings around town where fights with exes happened, acquaintances asking me how so-and-so is doing because we were once close friends and having to explain why we don’t hang out anymore, the knowledge that any given moment could lead to an awkward encounter with someone I haven’t spoken to in seven years. Gilbert & Ell capture that feeling well here in the rare duet that actually feels like both parties are singing directly to one another; the beginning is a bit boring but when that chorus hit I suddenly knew those exact feelings. Maybe this means I’ve finally become a Kentucky girl. At any rate, this song felt like home in a way I never expected.
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