In which Luke Bryan is attractive, and everyone wears hats.
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[4.38]
Brad Shoup: The timbres are well-considered, as if the crew had time to work things out all on their lonesomes under W.G. Walden’s supervision. If you told me the singers dialed in their parts, OK. To really put over the circumstances, they resort to rippity-rapping, which would already be an odd choice even these boys didn’t make growing up country sound like some combination of the domed city in Logan’s Run and the Warsaw ghetto.
[2]
Anthony Easton: A case of severely diminishing returns for three artists who have made excellent work in the last few years and smart work about psycho-geography. Here, they just make lazy attempts at chart-topping.
[3]
Iain Mew: I love the chunky guitar sound, and the upbeat rock approach suits the sense of competitive bonhomie as each singer tries to supply the strongest take. If their reminiscences occasionally leave me thinking of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch, that’s mostly my problem, but the song’s switch from past tense to present does get a bit shaky as the first verse implies a move on that just gets dropped thereafter.
[6]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Happy-hour homilies make the world go round, my friend. Also: “Hit it hard til the sun goes down” is one step from being a 2 Chainz line.
[5]
Alfred Soto: The boys don’t sing or play past their limits, although with Eric Church on board this train you’d think he’d risk a couple of sharp turns. Generic fun.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: The lineup and intro riff suggest a portent that nothing capitalizes on. As these guys would no doubt dog-whistle about, you don’t get nothing that you don’t earn.
[5]
Edward Okulicz: This wants to sound like driving a hundred miles an hour with the burning sun in your eyes, and the opening riff promises all that and then more — but whether it’s the song or the thick layer of guitars, something in this mix is afraid to really punish the accelerator pedal. The disappointing thing is how tamely the chorus peters out after starting so promisingly; the boys sing of going when you can’t go on, and then the song… kind of fizzles out. That’s the song in a nutshell — it starts again for another verse, and then it doesn’t.
[5]
Josh Langhoff: In other words, they’ll keep working this fruitless trope into the ground, without a trace of self-awareness, until language and music themselves collapse into a dusty singularity.
[3]