And lastly, DRUNK…
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[5.50]
Anthony Easton: There is something going on with Hilary Scott. Between this and “Downtown,” no one believes she wants to have fun, and the man she used to have fun with has left her. Some nice details, and I always like the uptempo heartbreak dichotomy, but her voice has grown more generic and the music hasn’t played catch-up.
[5]
Alfred Soto: The guitars louder, beats thumpier, banjo subtler, Lady Antebellum signal their intent to go after Florida Georgia Line dough, although if they really wanted to change shit they should’ve listened to T-Pain. Still, bless them for recording a tune that sounds as if the party and the music and the truth collided.
[7]
Patrick St. Michel: The second verse drowns out the intriguing tension hinted at by the first and the chorus — how our protagonist seeks out a night of fun to forget an ex but just ends up drinking a lot of booze (helps if you think “chase that disco ball around” refers to her just staring at said item with a glazed-over look). It’s great she has a good time, but that’s not nearly as interesting.
[5]
Brad Shoup: The party and the music and the truth rarely collide, and every minor chord in “Bartender” knows this. As a pop shot it’s terrific: easy to remember, the orange night sky turned into a big ol’ blanket. It’s the new medium-term soundtrack to driving yourself to a bar. And hopefully home again.
[5]
Megan Harrington: You’d be forgiven for thinking that every country artist is required by contract to release a single sponsored by Bacardi (er, Crown Royal in Lady Antebellum’s case) and “Bartender” approaches this obligation with all the weariness inherent in duty. Hillary Scott pleads for a little nightlife in a voice that ends each line with “I guess?” It’s a very thin bid for chart success in a genre that Billboard has gutted just as thoroughly as R&B and it’s timed perfectly. Their follow-up singles will almost certainly be more interesting, or, at very least, more convincing.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: Some people apparently like becoming single. They live in pop songs and stiletto commercials. They don’t break up, they kiss off; they charge free of their men in a whirl of self-love and sitcom sassiness and perfectly shaved legs. The rest of us are alone at 8 p.m. Friday because that’s when the plans used to be, and we’d sooner drag our puffy-eyed, discarded lump to a debutante ball than any kind of outing. But maybe we’ll be dragged and peer-pressured into some bar and drink and sulk with trepidation; maybe we’ll update the guy pawing at us like a stopgap resume job, or maybe we’ll just get bombed while talking about how bombed we’re getting, and we probably won’t be having fun just yet. Finding a new collaborator — in this case, to Taylor Swift’s longtime producer Nathan Chapman — also involves some amount of trepidation. Lady Antebellum’s worked with Chapman before on a bonus track — Stargate-produced, Avicii-chasing banjo-confetti confection “Compass” — but this is the start of something with stakes: shinier, more crafted, more “Can’t Fight the Moonlight.” The pop and the party and the grief collide, until it’s basically the bridge from “Bye Bye Bye.” And like that first new coupling, no one involved is really sure what they want. If “Bartender” were emotionally honest, she’d either pick the guy up or be too wounded to and skip straight to “Need You Now,” rather than demur and end the night on a censor-appeasing, girls-night-out pandering, easy-rhyming-with-DJ copout. If “Bartender” were a straight party song, Hilary Scott wouldn’t sing “what I’m really needing now is a double shot of Crown” in an impatient singsong craw bartenders might recognize, and the melody wouldn’t sound so steely-sad. It’s paradoxically kind of genius: a song about being the downer of the party that’s itself the downer of the party. Usually, “paradoxically” means “by accident.”
[5]
Jonathan Bradley: The darkness on the edge of a night out on the town is all too apparent on this one. “Bartender” is the negative of “Downtown,” which was a going-out song about having to stay in. With any luck, Lady Antebellum will come across a sozzled T-Pain, who previously recorded a song with the same title and theme. In its sports bar slickness, it wasn’t too far off in sound, either.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: Given that I too feel the need to go out and drink and dance from time to time even though I don’t really enjoy getting drunk, I kind of relate to Hillary Scott’s delivery of “Bartender.” It sounds like she’s been demanded to Have Fun at gunpoint but she’s just too damned bored to convince. And then the chorus comes, and it’s that light-headed feeling you get when you think you’re tipsy but you’re actually falling over your feet and your tongue on the way to your next drink. Unintentionally grim, this is, but also weirdly compelling as a case of getting it wrong and somehow getting something else right.
[6]