Throw in breakfast and it’s a deal, Mike.
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[5.12]
Alfred Soto: The country chart will soon learn if the world is ready for a Eustace, Fla. native and Billy Currington wannabe.
[3]
Crystal Leww: It’s an exciting time for country music right now, and it’s not just because of the “women” or the “return to its roots.” If anything, it’s quite the opposite; country music in the last two years has become open to experimenting with both its base sound as well as its lyrical content. Dudes like Sam Hunt, Canaan Smith, and Michael Ray succeed because you believe they could toss around a football with your dad and also sing Whitney Houston around the campfire with your mom. Michael Ray looks like the bad boy artist who lives in a loft in Pilsen, and “Kiss You in the Morning” is as hooky and poppy as anything you’d find playing right now on KISS FM, but yes, this is still country music. It’s the twang, it’s the ties to Nashville, and it’s the big grandiose sound that is describing something as simple as kissing ya girl all over town but especially first thing in the morning. Taylor Swift got popular for making songs that were so specific that they were relatable fantasy, and Ray’s got something similar here. I, too, want to wear faded jeans, confidently drop it low, have a boy notice my oddly placed tattoos, and kiss a boy under neon lights. I want to kiss Michael Ray in the morning, too.
[8]
David Sheffieck: Note: do not, whatever you do, kiss someone while running red lights. But if you try it, try to make it sound as cutely innocent as this song, where the guitar hooks are big and the most suggestive you get is to wonder what your crush is “hiding” under her clothes. Maybe the officer will go easy on you.
[5]
Thomas Inskeep: Get it? “Kiss You in the Morning” means he wants to have sex with you tonight, “girl,” after he’s showered you in every possible bro-country cliché. And after you’ve showed off “that little tattoo on your tanline,” which is a butterfly, of course, because you are a dumbass red-state redneck’s fantasy of what a “girl” is like.
[0]
Katherine St Asaph: This is presumably being sold as “sensitive” bro-country, but the sensitivity on offer consists of: drunkenly making out from parking lot to club to, it’s implied, bed; no subsequent kissing mentioned. And kissing someone the morning after is near-literally the least somebody can do; have we really reached a point as a society when a boy making the grand gesture of not sneaking out at 4 a.m. qualifies as romantic? It’s not that wanting to hook up is bad, it’s that christ, for once can any of these dudes be honest about their intentions instead of talking to girls like they’re simultaneously deliberate flirt outlaws who provoke men and Say Yes to the Dress princess lemming automatons who’ll fall indiscriminately for anything with the word “kiss”? I haven’t talked about the music because you already know what it sounds like, and there are no surprises.
[3]
Patrick St. Michel: What’s charming about Michael Ray isn’t that he’s sensitive, but rather that he’s awkward as heck in his come ons. Dude can’t even flirt without mentioning Dale Earnhardt Jr., and the idea of kissing someone while zooming past a stoplight — metaphor or not — is so clunky. But that’s way more real than some guy sharing his painfully researched Tumblr essay with someone at a bar — he really just wants to kiss someone he likes, to the point where that’s basically all he can say.
[6]
Anthony Easton: This white trash, Whitesnake, absurdly cock-led, third-tier rip-off, frat boy guitar grind of unabashed cliches is so stupidly perfect because of how it commits to an aesthetic and refuses to compromise. Like saying yes to a fourth rye and ginger when you have to work in the morning, I am seduced by the sheer power of this.
[9]
Edward Okulicz: The squawky guitar solo, or mini-solo, nicely emphasises how dorky this song is. Wide-eyed rather than lecherous, Ray’s got charm like bro-country’s dorky little brother.
[7]