Garth Brooks ft. Blake Shelton – Dive Bar

Ohhhhhh! Who performs at the dive bar under the sea?

[Video]
[4.67]Oliver Maier: I like how the official artwork for this song is a picture of a swimming pool, like whoever was in charge of visuals read the word “dive” and nothing else and was like “I have just the thing!”. Anyway this is utterly gruelling.
[1]

Alex Clifton: This is goofy as hell and made even better by the video, which has Brooks and Shelton surrounded by scuba masks and left sharks. It’s underwater because it’s a dive bar! A fun if general song about drinking, but it commits to the bit so well that I can’t help but be won over. I love puns way too much, and this one is executed just swimmingly.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Lot of drowning and bobbing and swimming in here — when it comes to writing about bars, Nashville songwriters can’t help but turn to fluid mechanics. (They also can’t stop namechecking Hank. It’s more the rhyme than the man at this point.) But then, our down-south dive bar was Deep Eddy Cabaret, cozy enough that they stocked sawed-off pool cues and sold only beer for many years. It’s one of those places that, when a photo goes up, it stays for decades: as true a mark of diviness (divinity?) as anything else I could think of. But the observer effect comes into play: if I felt comfortable stepping into it, it was no dive bar. Sometimes it’s blazingly obvious. There’s a good one on Menchaca: great bartenders, clientele leaves you alone… but they’ve got local-only beer and midcentury rustic-kitsch décor. It is, like “Dive Bar,” a theme-park take on the concept. The verses are an uncanny replica of Garth’s vintage burping honky-tonkers, right down to the hard-won rhyme for “oasis”; Shelton has fun mushing his way through the writerly tongue-twisters. The chorus takes a Dan Wilsonian turn at the end, both in its melodic resolution and its sense of a bar as a place from which you want a warm feeling in your mind, rather than your gut. As with Garth always and Blake in the last decade, there’s too much pep, too many mannerisms. They come off like liquor marketers. But isn’t that country?
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: A would-be “Friends in Low Places” for 2020, with the should-be natural addition of Brooks’ fellow Oklahoman Shelton — but the song’s not as good as “Places,” and Shelton’s really just a made-for-TV hack at this point, so this doesn’t ever gel the way it should. Also, Shelton’s singing with a weird accent which is off-putting, elbowing Brooks out of his own record.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: Inconsequential but fun, but wow, I’ve had to replay that second verse over and over because Blake Shelton didn’t always sing the long-a vowel sound like that, did he? He almost sounds Australian for a couple of lines, like that other guy who did a song called “Dive Bar” that one time. Brooks is a master of his art, and Shelton is basically a ham these days, and this is great for both.
[7]

Alfred Soto: All this soiled bag of refried beans has selling points are decent harmonies, the Stones crunch of the guitars, and a lively imagination. I mean, really: is Garth Brooks sneaking out for shots when Trisha mixes yummy cocktails at home?
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